Davies Symphony Hall. Increasingly a home away from home. I perform solo on the stage regularly throughout the season in my capacity as pre-concert lecturer and I also enjoy excellent seats during weeks in which I’m either lecturing or have written articles for the program book. Davies is a big hall that feels like an intimate one, a rare commodity in our world.
Debussy. The composer I have played more than any other — in fact, I have played all of the Debussy piano music, going so far as to play a complete Debussy cycle in 1985, four Monday night concerts spread two weeks apart. Whatever reservations I have about solo piano music stop at the Debussyean door; the Preludes, Etudes, various suites, and the like meet with my unconditional approval. I have never tired of them or felt that I have come anywhere near to exhausting their possibilities.
Delius. An acquired taste, I’ll grant you. I never could have tolerated his introverted Romanticism and quasi-Impressionism when I was younger. But I have acquired something of a penchant for him nowadays, especially those drowsy English landscapes such as On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. And the big song cycles such as “Songs of Sunrise” and “Sea Drift” absolutely send me.
Denver. As far as I’m concerned, Denver is my home town. That doesn’t make sense on the surface; I was born in Houston, spent my early childhood there, then we migrated to Fort Worth, Dallas, then several places in Indiana before arriving in Denver. But Denver is the setting for most of my transformative teen experiences; I went to high school there; my family is all gathered there. More to the point, Denver feels like my home town to me. It’s a place I recognize, a place with lots of memories.
Dickens. I’d give anything to be able to write that well, but then again, wouldn’t we all? I can open any Dickens novel to a random page and feel a big grin wrapping itself around my face; he never ran out of glorious combinations of words and ideas. I have my favorite moments and characters, of course. The spinster lady Miss Tox from Dombey & Son with her images of dessication and dryness. Miss Murdstone in David Copperfield whose character is summed up by her array of metallic clasps that snap shut like jaws. Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House who would stand immobile and unharmed were the entire country around him to sink into the ocean. The soggy London of Bleak House. The blistering white-light Marseilles of Our Mutual Friend. The frigid squalor of Dotheboy’s Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. The grim middle-aged male villians: Ralph Nickleby, Wackford Squeers, Thomas Gradgrind, Edward Murdstone. The incredible lists, such as Krook’s bottles in Bleak House. The sweetie-pies: John Jarndyce in Bleak House, Solomon Gill and Captain Cuttle in Dombey and Son, Newman Noggs and the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield, Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. The devious bastards: Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, James Carker in Dombey and Son, Fagin in Oliver Twist. The colorfully named minor characters: Tommy Traddles, Mr. Toots, Mr. Chillip, Miss Knag, Mrs. MacStinger. The children marked for death: Jo the street sweeper in Bleak House, Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son, Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Smike in Nicholas Nickleby. The miracles: Scooge’s awakening in A Christmas Carol, Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, Walter Gride’s dropping dead at the perfect moment in Nicholas Nickleby. I can do without the goody-two-shoe heroines (Kate Nickleby, Agnes Wickfield, Florence Dombey) but apart from that, there’s just no running out of cool stuff in Dickens.
Digital. I have embraced older recording tech—particularly vinyl LPs—with joy, but I remain an ardent advocate of digital audio. Yes, early CDs suffered from harshness and downright distressing blare. Yes, low-res mp3 files and dynamic compression are unfortunate. But a good digital recording reproduced by high-class equipment is orders of magnitude better than anything that came before. And it’s a lot more malleable.
Dogs. I have nothing whatsoever against dogs, and I’ve met quite a few sweet friendly ones. I remember bonding with a puppy one afternoon when I was a little kid. But I’ve never been a dog person, always a cat person.
Doris. Doris is my Muse. She’s generally reliable as long as I follow the rules: mornings are best, and don’t overtax her. She can come up with dictation exercises with the greatest of ease, she’s very good at conjuring up harmonic progressions in real time while in the classroom, and she has a tender regard for English and careful writing. Doris pipes up with suggestions and ideas quite volubly when she’s in the mood. Overall she likes life better with me now than she used to, when I kept pestering her to come up with interpretive ideas for piano performances.
Dormitory. I lived in the Peabody dorm during my freshman year. A modern two-tower affair with interior cinderblock walls, the Peabody dorms are late-1960s utilitarianism at its most uncompromising and severe. The good folks at Peabody were finding the place hard to fill, so they rented out rooms to students from the Maryland Art Institute. MAI was not all that distinguished an arts school, and its students had a certain marginality about them. Noise, violence, and pot smoking were the norm. One guy was a Brooklynite with such a strong accent that it almost sounded fake; he released his excess energy by throwing the lounge furniture against the walls. Most evenings I cowered in my room while Animal House went on outside. I moved into my own apartment as soon as I could.
Dubbing. I have become quite adept at dubbing media from analog sources to digital. Over the past year I have figured out how to deal with the craziness of elderly reel-to-reel tapes, some of which might have been made on oddly-configured machines that resulted in hearing one channel backwards while another ran correctly, or with wild speed variances due to warpage or such. I made some headway dealing with rickety cassette tapes, although in some cases I just couldn’t repair a 40-year-old cassette that was determined to break if I so much looked at it sideways. LPs loom large, and over the past year I have upgraded my turntable/cartridge rig twice in order to ensure quality playback. And I’ve even learned how to dub and join 78 RPM discs. I’ve discovered just how much noise reduction is appropriate; usually click removal and not much else. I even learned how to ameliorate the sound of a loudly-ticking wristwatch during a radio interview, and in one amusing instance, I removed an embarrassing release of intestinal gas from an interview.
Dvořák. I have become nearly besotted with the Dvořák symphonies and other orchestral works. Not that I was ever particularly indifferent to them. Oddly enough I’ve had a minor hex in operation in regards to program notes: my articles for both the 6th and 7th symphonies went into limbo after the conductors changed the program. So neither has ever appeared in print at the SFS, although the orchestra graciously paid me for them. I would like to rewrite at least the lead paragraphs of the 7th symphony article; the rest of the article is tolerable, however.