Free Composition

I have lived in San Francisco for forty years. Now I’m leaving. Even if a few yet remaining variables render my exact moving date TBA, the simple fact is that by the third week of September 2015 at the very latest I will no longer be a resident of San Francisco. I’m remaining in the Bay Area, however.

This is not some sad tale of having been squeezed out by ballooning housing prices. Far from it. My lovely and spacious two-bedroom house in the Castro district has been an affordable jewel for years. I could stick around and continue benefitting from its feather-light budgetary impact and the trivial commute it imposes. It’s a pure gingerbread Victorian lady, strikingly attractive, and at about 1200 square feet quite large for city living. Yet it is a Victorian, built in about 1903 as a humble workman’s row house. It wasn’t intended to last this long, and it’s feeling its age down to the marrow. Floors sag. Doorways lean. It lacks central heat and is poorly insulated. The electrical system is a hodgepodge and woefully inadequate for modern living. There’s practically no kitchen counter space. Closet space is limited. The minuscule single bathroom was renovated 15 years ago but needs a makeover. Even after extensive sewer repairs, there’s still something a little fishy going on down below. The roof’s OK for now but unlikely to sustain for long. The house throws up a lot of inconveniences, some minor, but some quite substantial.

It’s also a comfortable, sweet, human, and immeasurably dear old house. I have always loved it and I always will. But I’m letting it go. I’m taking on greater expense and, most significantly, a whopping bruiser of a commute that will suck up about three hours a day MWF, and about half that T/Th.

Am I crazy? No.

My state of mind as I anticipate leaving Baghdad-by-the-Bay? Relief. Joy. Happiness.

We once had a registrar at the Conservatory whose sustaining mantra was: We can stand ANYTHING for a year. My version: I can stand anything until September 20. Deliverance could well arrive sooner than that.

San Francisco, a.k.a. America’s Vienna, has been extraordinarily good to me. This marvelous career of mine has been made possible by the people and the musical institutions of San Francisco. I am grateful to this city, to its stellar musical community, and to its generous and supportive audiences, with every fiber of my being. And I’ll continue to work and practice my career here as always.

My dandy new house is more than reason enough to leave. I’m exchanging life in a quirky Victorian for a modern 2300 square-foot Mediterranean on a 6000 square-foot lot, 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, 3-car garage, central heat and air, two (gas) fireplaces, deck, front and back lawns, and all the modern bells and whistles including first-rate appliances in both kitchen and laundry room. And everything in spit-spot condition to boot. As of Friday, August 21, 2015 it will be absolutely and exclusively mine; my name on the title, my house, my property. That’s a powerful inducement. Brentwood, sunny Delta farm town turned affluent suburb, has won my heart and tugs at me almost as strongly. The irresistible attraction of house and town together make the long commute seem immaterial.

But I’d leave anyway.

For a long time now I have been deeply disenchanted with San Francisco as a place to live. I’m seriously out of sync with the city, despite having spent my entire adult life inside its borders as a resident. When I first arrived, the sheer cool factor of “living in San Francisco” sustained me—although I spent my first decade out in the Sunset District, where glamour is in very short supply. Over the past three decades my stellar living situation, accompanied by warm rapport with my neighbors, has kept me pinned in the Castro district, a neighborhood that I have always found unnerving and nowadays consider barely tolerable, despite my location on an oh-so-charming one-lane street lined with pretty Victorians.

The city’s appalling physical condition upsets, disconcerts, and even revolts me—the filthy sidewalks, the horrendous roads with their endless construction blockages and massive potholes, the ever-increasing numbers of feral street people, out-of-control lunatics, drugged-out vagrants, aggressive panhandlers, and petty criminals. Even the everyday, non-street people of San Francisco bother me: why are so many people so dirty? This is a city of unwashed hair and grubby clothes, of poor-to-nonexistent grooming, of unpleasant body odor and bad breath. It’s almost as though the grime creeping upwards off the sidewalks has attached itself to the inhabitants. Every time I return here after a visit elsewhere I am shocked anew by San Francisco’s prevailing low standards of personal hygiene. Nor is that just my imagination: visiting family members have been disturbed by it as well. Of course there are exceptions galore, but overall, it’s a dirty city filled with dirty people.

Everyday living in San Francisco imposes the death of a thousand cuts. Running errands can become an ordeal. If it isn’t nastiness on the streets and sidewalks, it’s impossible traffic and/or parking conditions. It’s incompetent, careless, aggressive, and appallingly rude drivers. It’s seemingly arbitrary road closures and detours. It’s gritty, crowded, dignity-sapping public transportation. It’s overcrowded stores, casually rude clerks, and the overpricing that accompanies skyrocketing commercial rents. It’s freezing cold winds. It’s bone-chilling rain that’s blown sideways instead of down, making an umbrella well-nigh useless. It’s vampires rummaging noisily (and sometimes messily) through the garbage the night before trash pickup. It’s cigarette butts on the front stoop and burns on the stairs from some street rat the night before. It’s having to double-padlock the little cubby underneath the front stairs so it won’t be used as a stash. It’s having to wear gloves and use tongs to collect crumpled cans or bags or cups or God only knows what, such as the half-eaten, half-cooked chicken leg I found on the driveway just this morning. It’s the stench of rotting human urine or worse. It’s spending an afternoon trying to remove a painted graffiti scrawl on the sidewalk. It’s never leaving the front door open for ventilation without standing guard because some vagrant is likely to walk right up the stairs and panhandle or steal. It’s regretting having a robust Meyer lemon tree in front because of the target it presents to riff-raff and passers-by who beat it with baseball bats or break branches to dislodge fruit. It’s being assaulted day and night by incessant construction noise while trying to avoid the smelly porta-potties on the sidewalk as tech types buy the old Victorian houses on the street and have them gutted. It’s being obliged to ferret out the careless contractor whose pickup truck is blocking the driveway, or having to call towing about some other offender. It’s being rudely awakened at 2:00 AM by a bunch of drunks returning from a night at the bars and continuing the party on their back porch—where the noise is amplified by acoustic reflection off the back of everybody else’s houses. It’s dank gray mornings followed by brief humid middays followed by frigid nights. It’s sirens constantly wailing. It’s obnoxious loud-mouthed people traipsing up and down the street at all hours of the day and night. It’s feeling like a frightened small animal huddling in its cage.

And it’s all for what? To have a cup of overpriced lukewarm “artisan” coffee on Valencia? To sunbathe on the (dog-pee soaked) grass in Dolores Park? To play frisbee on the Marina Green? To walk down Castro Street while being panhandled, jostled, offended, and annoyed by clipboard-bearing zombies with painted-on smiles? To take in the picture-postcard beauties of Alamo Square? Yes, the views are pretty. But considered solely as a park, Alamo Square sucks big time. Ditto Alta Plaza and its ilk. They’re all pretty sucky. The restrooms are closed or filthy or dangerous; the parks tend to be on steep slopes and are thus unsuited for a relaxed stroll; those lovely views come with blasting winds attached. And on the weekends the most popular parks are almost as crowded as a rush-hour subway, and with disturbingly unhygienic people.

Why have I put up with it for so long? San Francisco’s attractions remain the same whether I live in the city or not. For me, it’s mostly the music. Restaurants don’t matter all that much; I’m quite a good cook and, besides, my culinary pleasures run more towards traditional fare. I reserve the more esoteric, trendy stuff for the occasional night out. I find many SF restaurants to be pretentious. Not to mention ear-shatteringly noisy. Not to mention having no parking. Not to mention being stratospherically overpriced. Frankly, I’m just fine with dinner out at Black Angus or BJ’s Roadhouse. Mostly I prefer to eat at home.

When you get right down to it, for me San Francisco means the SF Conservatory, Davies Symphony Hall, and the Fromm Institute at USF—my three teaching venues. The rest is either no big deal—I’m fundamentally a homebody—or easily available in vastly-improved versions elsewhere.

So I leave with a bone-deep and heartfelt sigh of relief. My only regret is that I waited this long—but I had to reach the point at which my dissatisfaction trumped the attraction of my SF housing situation.

I’ll commute in to teach at the SF Conservatory and the Fromm Institute, to lecture at the SF Symphony, to visit. And when I’m finished I’ll leave and return to Brentwood.

After 40 years of being a stranger in a strange land, I’m going home.

We all have our characteristics, tics, mannerisms, habits, and the like. Without being altogether aware of it, over the years I have acquired a consistent behavioral pattern when it comes to making major purchases such as cars, high-end stereo gear, and in this case, a house.

I’m a planner and researcher type, a consumerist iceberg. All but a sliver of my action is hidden under the surface. I enter the endgame with the larger decisions made, so typically I do little in the way of shopping in the usual term. Consider my modus operandi with last year’s automobile purchase; I thought about it for months, researched and looked and thought, then took an extended test drive via a rental of pretty much the same make and model I sought. When the moment came to buy, I had already picked out the very car from the dealer’s inventory web site. With the money end all settled, I swooped into San Francisco Toyota in a 2003 Honda Civic and swooped back out in a 2014 Toyota Camry XLE. Game and match.

However hasty such shopping may appear to the casual observer, it is actually neither impulsive nor impetuous. We have here yet another manifestation of a professional musician’s credo: no matter what it takes, even if it damn near kills you, make it look easy and spontaneous. Dolly Parton’s dazzling quip to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show comes to mind: honey, you have no idea how much it costs for me to look this cheap.

I was right in character when it came to my current enterprise: Scott Buys His Dream House. The idea had been percolating for years, taking on various manifestations along its journey to full realization. Then came an extensive seeking out of the where. I set four non-negotiable requirements, or tests, the failure of any one mandating the failure of the whole:

1. It must be a sparkling suburb that expresses the classic American Dream in all its considerable glory
2. It must be a plausible commute to/from San Francisco
3. It must offer well-made, recent-model separate family homes that are affordable to the upper-middle/professional class
4. I must like it. (More or a less a given provided it passes Tests 1–3, but you never know.)

San Francisco itself, mind you, scores solid zeros on all but No. 2, which warrants about a C- due to frequent MUNI meltdowns and crowding, nonexistent and/or insanely expensive parking, walking through chilling zephyr winds while avoiding obnoxious panhandlers and feral street types, grime and filth everywhere, etc. So it was out into the greater Bay Area for me.

Plenty of inner Bay Area communities pass Tests Nos. 1, 2, and 4. But they flunk Test No. 3 big time as the poisonous miasma of San Francisco’s surreal property prices spreads far and wide. Buyers are fleeing outwards in droves. A million dollars for an unhabitable hovel in Berkeley: obscene. The situation has spread even to older upscale areas such as Walnut Creek. Thus one must expand one’s gaze outwards.

By definition any area in plausible distance from a BART terminus station scores well on Test No. 2, since it makes commuting to San Francisco possible without excessive traffic angst. Travel times on BART aren’t all that much of an issue since you’re just sitting there while the train rolls. The longer the travel time, the earlier you start. So consider the terminus stations—i.e., those at the end of their respective lines—as bases you drive to or from. Here’s what my researches, travels, and the like have taught me about that:

• You can forget about the SFO terminus since it encompasses the peninsula and abuts Silicon Valley. Total failure of Test No. 3.
• The Fremont terminus achieves a solid B on Test No. 1 (depending on where you go from there), but it’s about a D on Test No. 3.
• The Dublin/Pleasanton terminus gets an A on Test No. 1 (also depending on where you go from there), but only a C-/D on No. 3. The Amador Valley area is pricey, albeit not surreal.
• The Richmond terminus fares better than you might think, despite Richmond’s sickening failure of Test No. 1. That’s because the Richmond terminus allows access to Martinez and Vallejo, both of which earn about a C- on Test No. 1 and a D+ on Test No. 3. Both, however, come close to failing No. 4.
• The Pittsburg/Bay Point terminus earns a potential A+ on both tests No. 1 and No. 3. The areas nearest to the station score poorly—Pittsburg flunks both Test No. 1 and (especially) No. 4. But the eastern edge of Contra Costa County, within the outer periphery of Pittsburg/Bay Point’s sphere, goes gold across the board. In a few years the terminus will extend to the Hillcrest station, thereby shrinking driving time in favor of BART time.

So that was that: East County it will be. The actual town, whether southeastern Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood, or Discovery Bay, wasn’t as critical. They’re all pretty nice. Nevertheless, Brentwood—with its gorgeously landscaped new developments that complement, rather than obliterate, a cozy long-established Delta farm town—knocked Test No. 4 out of the park with an unconditional A++. Oakley took a strong second place with a big fat A.

So: the house. That was easier. Real estate resources such as Zillow and Realtor.com eliminate a lot of the spadework that used to take so much time and energy. Nevertheless, you still need to get out there in person; statistics, a description, and pictures can tell you only so much. But you can do a lot of the critical stuff—neighborhood look and feel, upcoming changes, crime statistics, etc.—on your own without taking up an agent’s time. Then you get yourself an agent and mortgage pre-approval, and you go to it.

That’s what I did. After pages and pages of Zillow listings, I got my pre-approval taken care of and scheduled a house-viewing day with a real estate agent. For about a week preceding our first trip out I revised, edited, and pared down my list of houses. (A few houses sold themselves off my list. So it goes.) The final five included two A+ choices and three A-/B+ models. If none of the five panned out, well, tomorrow is another day.

Out we went. I kept my notebook handy. One A+ house dropped to F very quickly, according to my notes. awfully lived-in for 10 yrs old. smoker on the front porch! butts in ashtray. animals, pets? messy cat and dog dishes on driveway. carpets? pee and smoke. home-installed security camera? wires all over roof. ICK paint colors inside; have to paint everything. Carpets tired. Kitchen SUCKS (underlined heavily). Appliances NO. Paved over back yard—???? All cement?? ACKK (also underlined heavily.)

So much for that house. Besides, it was too big.

I downgraded a more modestly-priced B+ house to a B: lovely neighborhood! pretty! kinda small. small. bathrooms like apartment. too small. nice kitchen.

Another slightly higher-priced B+ house suffered the same fate: gated community. pretty streets. too small (underlined twice). kitchen??? (as I recall, it was elegantly appointed but uninspiring.)

The next page says nothing about the house, but it says plenty about the deposit, the warranty, and the cost of the escrow-period inspections. Then follows one simple, circled annotation:

This is it.

I had already gone there twice before to give it a quiet looky-look and scope out the neighborhood. I had read its Zillow page repeatedly, obsessively. I had consulted Google Earth. I had studied neighborhood/city statistics, crime statistics. I even dreamed about it one night. All this had me about 90% sure that it was, in fact, the one. Once I got inside, and saw that it was an order of magnitude better than I had even dared to hope, I knew.

My canny and wise realtor helped me to fashion a strong offer. It was in the seller’s hands the next morning. They accepted it a day later.

This is it. Brentwood, California: here I come.

A realtor’s pic (slight wide-angle lens distortion) of my new living and dining room

My pic (no distortion) of part of my new back yard, seen from the stairs leading off the deck

My musical interests are broad and eclectic. I’m happy with Renaissance composers, Baroque masters, Classical, Romantic, 20th century folken. I have stuffed a lot of music into my noodle over the decades. But I’m neither indiscriminate nor happy-go-lucky inclusivist in my enthusiasms. I have little to no patience for music written to agendas (as is the case with the bulk of serialist music) nor do I have much truck with flimsy stuff meant for quick entertainment—i.e., most early-Romantic concertos, bel canto operas, or hardcore nationalistic jobs along the lines of Frederika’s Magic Dirndl.

Without question I’m a traditionalist; my heroes are Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Debussy. I have a long-standing fascination with Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Handel, Vivaldi, etc., etc. My tent is big. My passions are intense.

But there are some composers whose music simply does not engage me, or at least the bulk of it does not. I’m going to limit myself here to those composers who are not part of some lock-jawed movement; hence, I will not be taking a cudgel to the usual serialist villains. As far as I’m concerned those guys cerebralized and agitpropped their way out of any proper consideration as composers. Nor do I intend to pick on the mediocrities who have wandered into my auditory radar. No. My targets are real composers who were writing real music and who have their place in the mainstream, but whose work I just don’t get. I’ll make a few stabs at understanding why, but in all likelihood there is no why. Like attraction, like love, like food vendettas, it just is.

Albert Roussel

Roussel was a B-list composer at best, but he has his well-heeled and well-trained enthusiasts, including master conductor Jean Martinon. I’ve tried, really I have. I gave some hard attention to the symphonies and ballet scores. Can’t remember a note of any of them. Recently I picked up the Martinon/Chicago Symphony recording of the Bacchus and Ariadne Suite No. 2, probably Roussel’s most popular piece.

Despite a spectacularly fine performance, recorded to a T by RCA Red Seal, it leaves little impression save an overall sense of needless complication overlaying colorless banality. My problem with Roussel is that he’s neither fish nor fowl; somewhat modern, somewhat Debussy-ish, somewhat Romantic. But nothing ever snaps into focus. To my mind he belongs on the same shelf as those mostly obscure chaps who cranked out quasi-Debussy/echt-Les-Six “concours” pieces for the yearly juries at the Paris Conservatory. Come to think of it, Roussel was one of those chaps.

Franz Liszt

I may be a pianist—well, sort of—but I just don’t get Liszt. I find his concertos ridiculously fustian and overbearing, the tone poems unfocused and boring, the religious music glumly uninspiring. I’ve never cared for any of the piano music, especially not those gut-buster jobs that so many pianists seem to yearn for with a lust that I find frankly inexplicable. What, on earth, is even remotely attractive about the Spanish Rhapsody? Do these same pianists enjoy watching Andrew Dice Clay videos? Do they think it’s funny when old ladies fall down? Do they swoon in ecstasy over Wayne Newton? Crass is as crass does.

My ennui in regards to Liszt was an early indicator that I wasn’t temperamentally cut out to be a full-time virtuoso pianist. Even after all these years, I go flat fast around Liszt’s music. I have never performed a note of Liszt in public. I have presented exactly one piece of his, and that was his woefully lackluster Hamlet as part of a session on tone poems based on Shakespeare. To say that the Liszt Hamlet compared poorly with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet is the understatement of the year.

Frank Martin

On those vanishingly few occasions that I willingly listen to a Frank Martin piece, I have the same reaction as I do to your typical resentment-soaked Berkeley store clerk: hey there sonny, is that blasé indifference of yours real, or merely a defensive mechanism? Is there a living, breathing human in there somewhere?

Martin seems to attract more than his share of pompous twits—you have been warned—so God help you if you don’t give his last name the proper Frenchified pronunciation. Mahr-TAN, never MAR-tin. I don’t know if plain old Frank is OK, or if you should go for broke and christen him Frahnque.

Not a composer to warm up to. Chilly isn’t the half of it. Frigid is more like it. Everything coiffed and arranged. Not a note out of place. Nary a lip left uncurled. Frostily elegant, punctilious, supercilious.

If I’m listening to a Martin piece while home alone, I like to fart as loudly as possible, or if the plumbing won’t cooperate, then see if I can conjure up a nice loud belch at least. Balance.

Edgard Varèse

I won’t go on very long about this guy. I don’t like ugly music. And, nom d’un chien, did he write ugly music!

His music may not really belong on this list. It’s not that I don’t get it. I just don’t like it. I really, really don’t like it.

Frédéric Chopin

The Grand Finale is also a Big Surprise—yes, that Frédéric Chopin. A super-duper A-plus composer winds up on my “meh” list. Chopin just doesn’t float my boat. Hoist Chopin up my flagpole, I don’t salute. I don’t find any of his music actively repellent or anything like that, but he just doesn’t fluff out my sails. (Oh, all right. I’ll ix-nay with the orny-cay etaphors-may.) I haven’t played a Chopin piece in, oh, twenty years. I never listen to Chopin when I’m at home. A lot of that has to do with my overall aversion to solo piano music: I just don’t like it. (There’s another little tip-off that a life as a full-time piano virtuoso wasn’t in the cards.)

I don’t really know why. But there it is. Chopin’s writing does not reach me at any personal level. It passes through without making much of an impression, neither good nor bad, sort of like steamed tofu or your typical episode of Antiques Roadshow.

In the wake of same-sex marriage being legalized across the board in the United States, the community of religious conservatives is ruefully contemplating its collective navel. A particularly regretful screed comes from Rod Dreher, who supplied a distinctly bitter article for the June 26 issue of Time. Here’s the critical paragraph:

…we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

This is the new normal. And it’s going to become more and more normal as time goes by. Traditional Protestant Christianity has been on the retreat for generations and is not about to surge back. This just isn’t a lily-white, church-going Protestant nation any more. Not that it ever really was. That’s why the First Amendment reads as it does.

Consider how long it has been since Sunday mornings were set aside for church attendance. In the late 1950s, Rodgers & Hammerstein spoke of Sunday bliss in their musical Flower Drum Song:

Sunday, sweet Sunday,
With nothing to do
Lazy, and lovely,
My one day with you.

Hazy, and happy,
We’ll drift through the day.
Dreaming the hours away.

While all the funny papers
Lie and fly around the place
I will plant my kisses on
Your funny face!

Dozing, then waking,
On Sundays you’ll see,
Only … me.

Hmmm … nothing there whatsoever about going to the local church. No services. No Sunday school for the kiddies. No church social afterwards. As far as I know nobody picketed the St. James Theater in protest of the blasphemy implied in those lyrics—i.e., that Sunday was dedicated to snuggly lovemaking rather than attendance to matters ghostly. Yet those lyrics were written for a character who is a thoroughly Americanized Chinese woman. Flower Drum Song is all about assimilation into American culture, but nowhere does it utter a peep about church-going as a component of that process. There’s plenty about playing baseball and dancing the cha-cha and going to nightclubs and listening to Perry Como sing La Paloma. No church. By the late 1950s church didn’t matter all that much. You could assimilate just fine without it.

Flower Drum Song is only a musical comedy, and a pretty threadbare one at that, but it does point in the direction the wind was blowing even as long ago as the Eisenhower administration. Getting dressed up and going to church isn’t obsolete by any means, but it is increasingly a quaint custom, and not only amongst the educated elites.

Somewhere along the past decades America crested through one last fling with Protestant triumphalism—think Jerry Falwell—and then rapidly lost interest. In a country that has become progressively more pluralist and inclusivist, those old-timey Protestants seem like cultural dinosaurs, grimly hanging on to Brylcream and braids and Buster Brown shoes. I am fully aware of how utterly unreasonable and unfair such a view actually is. Protestants are, in and of themselves, every bit as pluralist as the rest of America. It isn’t that they necessarily are such ostrich-brained reactionaries. It’s just that they’re perceived as such, and by clutching to their notion of a mythical Christianized America, they reinforce rather counter the stereotype.

Which suggests that they really need to get over the whole sexuality issue, get their noses out of people’s lives, and start concentrating on actually being Christians—i.e., generous, compassionate, intellectually engaged, concerned with the beam in their own eyes rather than the mote in their neighbors’. That’s asking a lot, given Christianity’s doleful history of persecution, repression, and bigotry. Dreher’s article is most emphatically not a step towards détente. In fact, he describes “orthodox” Christians as exiles in their own country. I’m not altogether sure what he means by “orthodox” but I’m guessing that his definition includes neither Episcopalians nor Catholics. He calls for an insular, monastic approach—i.e., for his brand of Christians to huddle together in defense against the depredations of the secular world all around them.

I rather like the thought of a little orthodox Christian community tucked in a corner of the city, bound by certain streets, with its own markets and community centers. Dreher tells us that:

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

…Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.

Hmmm. “Benedict Option” sounds quite lofty and fine. But English already has a fine word that describes a population that is insulated from the larger society by its own walled neighborhood.

The word is ghetto.

Consider another fine English word that is equally appropriate to the situation at hand.

That word is karma.

And one more word.

Irony.

This morning I prepare to return to San Francisco after five days here in Anchor Bay on the Mendocino Coast. I chose this particular week carefully: it’s the gay pride celebration in San Francisco, a time when I prefer to take myself elsewhere and avoid the aggravation of the noise and disruption. Not that I have anything against the pride celebration; it’s a fine thing to do and this year was particularly exuberant given the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. But I live on the edge of the Castro. I don’t like the near-nonstop noise, not to mention the equally near-nonstop backyard parties taking place more or less in my own back yard. In short, I prefer to get out.

At least most years I promise myself that I will get out, then fail to act and suffer accordingly. This year I planned ahead and chose the Mendocino Coast. That was a careful selection: while it may be only a short ways north from San Francisco, it’s a world apart in culture, style, and feeling. A good part of that has to do with the difficulties one must encounter just to get there. Geography dictates that a smooth multi-lane Interstate is out of the question. The mountains, cliffs, and bays of the coast pose a daunting challenge to road-builders and travellers alike. Highway 1 is a supreme engineering achievement, but it’s nonetheless a narrow two-lane road that rises, falls, corkscrews, and offers a constantly-changing landscape that beguiles the eye and distracts the driver. And yet Highway 1 is the single connecting thread between the small communities that dot the coastline. To get anywhere on the Mendocino Coast, one travels Highway 1. Period. There is no other road.

Nor is it easy to get to Highway 1. After crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, you may take the longest route by heading west to Highway 1 at Stinson Beach then crawling your way north from then on. Most people prefer to stay on the inland interstate-like Highway 101 for as long as possible, then head to the coast via an east-west connecting highway. There are three. The southernmost is the Valley/Bodega Road from Petaluma, which brings you out to the coast at Bodega Bay. The next candidate is Highway 128 from Cloverdale (well north of Santa Rosa), which runs through the Alexander Valley before plunging into a magnificent—and nausea-inducing—twist/turn through the somber green caves of a redwood forest that carpets the banks of the Navarro River, then reaches Highway 1 well south of Mendocino town proper. Or you can zoom all the way up Highway 101 to Willits and take Highway 20 westwards over what was once the old logging trail; after a nonstop roller-coaster pathway up and down the hills you reach the Eel River basin and follow that serpentine path along for miles. Highway 20 is gorgeous, and always slow-going thanks to the many recreational vehicles that impose a 20mph or less speed limit just about everywhere along its route. It ends at the unrelieved drabness of Fort Bragg, just about the worst introduction possible to the endless wonders of the Mendocino Coast.

Apart from taking a private airplane to one of the various airports, that’s it for getting here. It’s not easy to reach. That accounts for the bucolic atmosphere and sense of changelessness. I’m a bit ashamed of myself when I contemplate how few times I’ve actually come up here, and then mostly briefly. Yesterday’s drive along Highway 128 reminded me of a visit 35 years ago as passenger in a decomposing AMC Gremlin driven by a nervous-nellie chap who honked the horn at every curve and stopped every half-mile or so to have a fit of hysterics. I’m sure I haven’t been up here in at least twenty years.

This time around I came for five days, had no agenda, and spent most of my time exploring. I’ve tried out most of the beaches along here: Cook Beach, Anchor Bay, Schooner Gulch, Manchester State Beach. I’ve gone to Point Arena (town, cove, and lighthouse) and Manchester and Gualala and Albion and Little River and Caspar and Mendocino and Fort Bragg. I went inland to Boonville and Navarro and Ukiah and at least drove through Willits. I’ve stopped wherever I felt like stopping and for however long I wanted. I tried Anchor Bay’s two restaurants, one Mexican and the other Thai, both quite nice. I’ve had really first-class barbecue two nights running in a friendly roadhouse-style restaurant in Gualala, a decent but undistinguished spinach quiche for lunch in Mendocino, and spectacularly fine salmon down south on the way up here in Jenner. I’ve gotten sunburned. I have a blister on one foot from sandal-chafing. My legs are tired.

I read half of one of the six books I brought along. The shaky WiFi here at my inn drops its connection frequently, thus conspiring with the rest of my environment to keep me detached from the urban world to the south. I’ve gotten enough information to know what’s going on: same-sex marriage, Obamacare vindicated, the two New York prison fugitives killed/captured.

This isn’t hickville. It’s still northern California with all that implies; many people have strong roots in San Francisco and know the city as well as I do. Despite the driving challenges, one must remember that Santa Rosa is a mere two hours away, about the same time it can take to make it from Walnut Creek to San Francisco in rush hour. Thus it manages to be a world apart while remaining very much part of the world: modern, trendy, sophisticated, but nevertheless still timeless. Much of it presents a universal Northern California of rolling hills dotted with ancient barns, all stretching alongside a vertiginous coastline. Wildflowers far outnumber people, and farms far outnumber towns. Apart from the grimly utilitarian Fort Bragg there isn’t a town without its own quirky charm, even if the “town” is little more than a wide strip along Highway 1—as is true of Manchester and my own Anchor Bay. It’s a car culture by necessity but not a freeway culture; there’s a world of difference there. One must be mindful of one’s gasoline usage since gas stations aren’t all that common. Then again, you can’t really go all that far in terms of absolute mileage. It just feels like greater distances than it is, given not only the terrain but the marked individuality of the towns. There’s a wisdom in banning chain restaurants from most of these towns: you don’t find a McDonald’s or Taco Bell until Fort Bragg, and the coast is all the better for the lack. Markets are local instead of being chain stores—again, head for Fort Bragg if you must go to Safeway.

I leave reluctantly. The parties over, San Francisco will be its usual self—crowded, noisy, dirty—when I return. Presumably my house hasn’t been trashed by careless revellers staggering along my side street. It’s not as though I’m going back to work: my summer vacation has six weeks yet to run. I’ve got time for more wandering, and I intend to take full advantage of the freedom. But this was one of my best decisions: five days in a charming bed & breakfast in a tiny hamlet on a high bluff overlooking a gorgeous northern beach.

I won’t let 20 years elapse until my next visit, that’s for sure.

It’s really a shame that Elgar’s music isn’t better known here in the US. Of his substantial output we get regular performances only of the Enigma Variations, together with the two wonderful concertos—violin and cello. But the rest languishes more unheard than not: the two symphonies, the programmatic overtures, the cantatas, the oratorios, the chamber and vocal works. And yet there’s so much of it that is truly first-rate stuff, not only in relationship to English composers, but to the sweep of Western music in general.

Of late I’ve acquired a penchant for the 1901 Cockaigne Overture, subtitled “In London Town.” (“Cockaigne” is pronounced more or less just as you suspect it might be; George Bernard Shaw suggested that if it bored English audiences, Elgar could change the name to Chloroform.) Cockaigne, written soon after the Enigma Variations and Gerontius but well before the First Symphony, is a product of Elgar’s early compositional maturity. No genteel Victorian London of well-heeled ladies and gents raising their teacups to each other at Ascot, this is a bustling, brawling, noisy, exciting London—and a lushly romanticized one as well, filled with ardor and yearning.

Cockaigne packs a wallop in its brief fifteen-minute running time. Cast in a sturdy three-part form that hints at sonata-allegro, it’s just as much fun to examine for its orchestration as for its varied and masterfully combined materials. There are definitely programmatic elements in the work, but the many themes suggest, rather than depict, their targets and associations.

The “bustle” theme takes on the role of what would be the Primary Theme in a full-tilt sonata-form movement. Note that it carries within it the seed of a descending sequence, in its own descending scale form:

A wonderful transitional theme carries the instruction Nobilmente, the first appearance of this quintessentially Elgarian marking in one of his orchestral scores. The “noble” theme will recur throughout Cockaigne and will, in grand Romantic fashion, provide the final peroration:

I hear echoes of Die Meistersinger in the “Secondary Theme” proper—most definitely a lover’s theme, young couples perhaps strolling through the parks or along the sidewalks:

Another transitional theme brings to mind images of cheerful street types, Cockneys perhaps, zestily impudent and tripping about with nervous grace. Note that this is actually the “noble” theme, in diminution and made sequential, one of those Meistersinger moments as when the noble masters’ theme becomes the apprentices’ jaunty tune:

A long build-up leads to the appearance of the gung-ho “Marching Band” passage, perhaps a tad bombastic but glorious fun in its unabashed pomp and energy:

Whew. That’s a lot of stuff. In the quasi-development section many of these tunes are combined, forming a dense weave that evokes a tapestry of associations. With the return of the big “bustle” theme we reach a kind of Recapitulation; the “Meistersinger” theme follows, the Marching Band makes another grand appearance, and then Elgar caps it all with a Cinemascope statement of the “noble” theme, complete with an optional organ part for those orchestras lucky enough to have one. A quick blast through the “bustle” theme, some rousing whacks on the timpani, and it’s all over.

With its frequent mood and tempo changes and potential to blast into sonic overdrive, Cockaigne is a bear to pull off successfully. All too easily it can devolve into travelogue mush or, given too intense of a performance, become strident and overbearing. And yet Elgar’s notation is immaculate and detailed: this is a score with meticulous diacritical markings throughout, all crying out for careful attention. It requires a conductor who knows that the abbreviation ten. over a note means more than just a hold, or that a hairpin <> dynamic might be more than just a casual swell. The dynamics run from ppp all the way through the fff that concludes the first big statement of the “Marching Band” theme, while long-breathed tempo changes require careful stewardship. But throughout it all, there’s something so irresistibly flowing about Cockaigne that micro-managing carries the potential for ruining those long Elgarian lines.

I consulted my (ridiculously large) library and examined a dozen recordings ranging from 1917 to this very year. Of those, three truly nailed the thing—at least in my humble opinion—while only one really missed the mark altogether. Not surprisingly most of these are English orchestras led by English conductors, but there are some exceptions.

Elgar’s Own Recordings

Edward Elgar, the first of the major composers to make extensive use of the gramophone, recorded Cockaigne no fewer than three times. The first dates from February 28, 1917 with Elgar leading a nameless orchestra. Given the pre-microphone technology of the day, in which the players huddled around one or two recording horns, we can expect the sound quality to be seriously compromised, and it is. Cockaigne is written for an XXL-size orchestra, only a subset of which could be used in the recording. Furthermore, the high costs of gramophone discs in those days (as much as $5.00 each, $75.00-ish today) dictated that Cockaigne be condensed down to a single side—about four and a half minutes long. Given that Elgar made the decisions about what and where to cut, the work doesn’t suffer as much as you might think it would from being truncated to a third of its length. Nor is the recording as much of a trial to hear as you might suspect, either. Modern restoration technology has brought out more than its creators ever heard and reveals a chipper, crisp performance, allowing for some dicey moments in the orchestra. That’s understandable under the circumstances. Retakes required taking an entire side at a gulp, so everyday boo-boos were tolerated. Elgar’s 1917 Cockaigne is a delightful rendition, all things considered.

Electric recording brought about a sea change in the recording industry. Orchestras were probably the most obvious beneficiaries of the new technology, since it allowed for an entire orchestra to be recorded with something approaching high fidelity. HMV lost no time getting Elgar up on the podium to conduct his major orchestral works for the microphone. Cockaigne was among his earlier products of the new age, recorded in Queen’s Hall with the Royal Albert Hall orchestra on April 27, 1926. For my money this is the one to cherish: it’s unusually bright (clocking in at a breezy 13 minutes) but avoids any sense of being driven or pushed. It’s just joyous and fast-paced, with plenty of breathing room for the slower spots such as the Meistersinger theme. Maybe the Royal Albert Hall chaps don’t rank in the inner circle of fine orchestra players, but they follow Elgar’s vital leadership and acquit themselves quite well. This is one of the recordings to use an organ in the final peroration of the “noble” theme, quite an achievement for early electric tech.

This is probably the best place to mention that Elgar’s frequently zippy tempi had nothing to do with the limited playing time of 78 rpm discs. Consider that he could have slowed down that 1926 Cockaigne by a good two minutes playing time and still fit on three sides. No less an eminence than Yehudi Menuhin himself testified that the tempi in his legendary 1932 recording of the Violin Concerto were in no way influenced by disc limitations. Those are the tempi he and Elgar wanted. If folks tend to play the piece slower these days, all well and good, but Elgar liked it faster.

On April 11, 1933 Elgar stood on the podium in London’s then-new Abbey Road Studio No. 1 and conducted his third recording of Cockaigne with the also then-new BBC Symphony Orchestra. Although this is the recording that has gone down as the composer’s reference, it lacks the bumptious vitality of the 1926 outing. One must remember that Sir Edward was in the last year of his life. He was tired, ill, and grumpy. Like his younger contemporary Richard Strauss, he was just as capable of stolidly wooden leadership as he was of podium magic. Unfortunately this Cockaigne seems to be from one of those lesser days. The BBC band is more polished than the Royal Albert orchestra, but they lack the other orchestra’s edge-of-the-seat commitment. It’s a perfectly good Cockaigne, to be sure, but despite its dramatically higher level of orchestral skill, it must stand second to Elgar’s jaunty 1926 version. And no organ for the final “noble” theme.

It was HMV’s practice to make multiple wax masters during the recording sessions. Most of the time those were made with a split feed off a single microphone, but every once in a while they used a second microphone with a slightly different placement for the alternate wax master. One of those alternate masters has survived and has been used to create what’s called an “accidental stereo” of the last four minutes or so of Cockaigne. It took a lot of technological know-how to pull that off—speeds and phases had to be matched—but the result is fascinating.

Post-Elgar Mainstream British Conductors

Unusual for a British conductor, Thomas Beecham was never much of an Elgarian, but he did put down a perfectly serviceable Cockaigne in 1954 with his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The rendition is neither distinguished nor objectionable. Nothing goes wrong: the tempi are more conservative than Elgar’s but not out of whack in any way. Overall this is a “cool” rendition, but not cold by any means—dig Beecham’s hell-for-leather rendition of the “Marching Band” passages. And Beecham’s Royal Philharmonic simply plays circles around any of Elgar’s orchestras.

Now for a disappointment. One would think that Adrian Boult would give us one of the all-time great Cockaignes. He was, after, a close colleague of Elgar’s and a notable interpreter of his major works such as the symphonies. The recent EMI edition of his complete Elgar recordings tops out at a whopping 19 CDs. He left us four recordings of the Enigma Variations alone. He’s one of the very few major conductors to take on an almost-forgotten ballet, The Sanguine Fan. But Cockaigne would appear to have been off his radar; he left us only one recording, made in All Saints Church in 1970 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. While the performance is blessed with a gorgeous recording by EMI’s ace engineers, it’s an altogether sloppy and uncommitted reading. Elgar’s meticulous markings might as well have been erased from the score, with only the broadest tempo changes acknowledged. The orchestra plays professionally enough but one gets the distinct impression that perhaps this most skilled of sight-reading orchestras was playing with little or no rehearsal. Heck: the players must have known the piece well enough (what British orchestra doesn’t?) but they just plough through.

Let’s balance disappointment with vindication. In my opinion John Barbirolli never gets his due, especially by American critics and listeners. Maybe it was that unhappy tenure at the New York Philharmonic that did it. Besides, Barbirolli’s home-base Hallé Orchestra wasn’t all that great back in his day, unlike the sterling ensemble it has since become. But Barbirolli was a hell of a great conductor, and his 1962 Cockaigne at the head of the august Philharmonia Orchestra—Klemperer’s Philharmonia, Karajan’s Philharmonia—gets my vote as the finest of them all. The pacing is less quick than Elgar’s (it’s two minutes longer than the 1926 version) but never drags. Barbirolli doesn’t overplay the yearning in the Meistersinger theme but allows for it to breathe fully, and in the loudy-rowdy parts, such as the Marching Band, you can almost see the gentlemen of the Philharmonia grinning from ear to ear. It doesn’t hurt that Barbirolli had London’s acoustically glorious Kingsway Hall for his recording venue. No organ at the end, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Another triumph, albeit of a different sort, comes from Jeffrey Tate at the head of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1991. I tend to think of Tate as a Mozartean and chamber conductor (he was head of the English Chamber Orchestra for fifteen years) but here he brings his always meticulous musicianship to a work which some might treat as a mere crowd-pleaser. The result elevates Cockaigne to a level of expressiveness and innate dignity that even Elgar might have found surprising. This is the slowest Cockaigne on record (17 minutes!) due to the loving care lavished on the slower melodies, not only the Meistersinger and “noble” themes, but also the middle-section tapestries of interwoven materials. There’s plenty of fire in the “Marching Band” sequence—and boy, does it ever strut!—and the use of the organ in the final peroration is simply stunning. In short, this is some kind of a desert-island Cockaigne, perhaps not to everyone’s taste; some might find it micro-managed. But I love it. And who couldn’t admire a performance of such obvious commitment? The LSO’s playing is simply beyond criticism.

Mark Elder and the Hallé came up with a Cockaigne in 2002 that combines luminous orchestral tone with exquisite pacing and a richly sympathetic approach. I’m a big fan of today’s Hallé, an elegant orchestra that’s capable of serious sizzle when necessary. The Elder/Hallé of the Elgar First Symphony is my go-to recording of choice, its sweetly tragic rendition of that work’s magnificent Adagio in my opinion the most moving of them all. Certainly their Cockaigne strays far from Elgar’s own more direct, almost earthy renditions. But there’s a great deal to be said for this eloquent, if slightly cool, performance, with a grandly sonorous organ in the final peroration.

A much rowdier approach can be experienced in Alexander Gibson’s knockout romp with the Scottish National Orchestra, recorded in 1983 and a mainstay on the Chandos label ever since. And with good reason: Gibson stays much closer to Elgar’s zesty spirit, but unlike his noble precedessor he has a truly crackerjack orchestra at his disposal. Coming on the Gibson/Scottish immediately after Elder/Hallé is a bit like running to a big party downstairs after a posh afternoon in the airy upstairs: even the sonics of the recording are appropriately brighter and edgier than the Hallé’s gorgeously cushioned engineering. Cold beer, perhaps, after vintage champagne. Both wonderful.

Mad Max Solti

That Hungarian firebrand Georg Solti, normally a peerless judge of musical pacing, drops the ball quite badly with his 1976 Cockaigne, recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. At least the LPO players are more on their mettle than they are in the easy-going Boult performance of six years earlier, but Solti over-drives them to the point of near-chaos at times. Although there are some very fine passages, overall this is a distressing Cockaigne—more New York than London, and New York on a particularly frenetic day at that. Even the passionate parts are overdone, pushed to operatic shrieking. The Marching Band comes off sounding more like an invading army than a jaunty red-coated Coldstream Guards regiment, and the final Nobilmente peroration is more slugged out than sung. Sad. Solti’s rendition of the First Symphony is one of the better ones in my opinion (although the last movement does become a scramble at times), but this is not a Cockaigne to recommend.

Two Recent Offerings from non-British Conductors

We have two Cockaignes from today’s younger conductors at the head of their respective orchestras. Vasily Petrenko has completed his Shostakovich cycle in Liverpool and so now would seem to be heading towards things Elgarian. A brand-new Cockaigne (coupled with the First Symphony) is an excellent performance in the Beecham sense: utterly professional, polished, but not necessarily distinguished from its counterparts. There is no faulting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, which has evolved from fine regional orchestra to a secure place amongst England’s finest bands. And there’s really no faulting Petrenko either; he’s a masterful conductor with a vivid podium presence. It’s a good performance, period. Excellent, even. I haven’t been able to warm up to it all that much, though. Maybe it’s just a little too coiffed.

To wrap things up we have the 2014 outing from the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo at the head of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Thus Cockaigne escapes its English roots somewhat—although Oramo served as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra up through 2008 and is now in charge of the BBC Symphony. Thus he’s not quite as non-English as he might seem on the surface. Oramo and the Stockholm band give a sturdy performance, also in Beecham mode with its rock-solid technical mastery. For this listener, the recording’s stellar audio (in high-definition digital, no less) does not compensate for the just-the-facts-ma’am literalness of the performance, although the orchestra itself plays flawlessly, as one would expect: the Royal Stockholm is a seriously wonderful orchestra, after all. I’ll give them full credit for a bang-on marvelous “Marching Band” passage, one of the most thrilling I’ve ever heard.

The Final Verdict

So it all boils down to the three recordings that impress me as giving Cockaigne its well-deserved due:

• Edward Elgar, Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, 1926: maybe not as polished as the 1933 BBC Symphony rendition, but bristling with life and vitality.
• John Barbirolli, Philharmonia Orchestra, 1962: altogether the no-brainer recommendation; lively, passionate, and gorgeously played.
• Jeffrey Tate, London Symphony Orchestra, 1991: a deeply personal and surprisingly intimate approach to a piece often treated as a mere showpiece.

One afternoon, audio recordings metamorphosed from toys into respectable and lucrative media products. The precise afternoon is easy to pinpoint. It was a Tuesday—March 18, 1902. The place was the Hotel di Milano, in (guess where) Milan, Lombardy. Present in the upper-floor room was a young American recording engineer named Fred Gaisberg, recently hired by The Gramophone and Typewriter Company, Ltd., and possibly a bit on edge: his company had forbidden the forthcoming session due to what seemed to them as an exorbitant fee demanded by the soloist. Also present were a local pianist, Salvatore Cottone, and—just to keep Gaisberg feeling the heat—the G&T Company’s local agent in Milan.

The artist was a young tenor who had made a hit in his first appearance a week earlier at La Scala in a now-forgotten opera by Baron Franchetti, Germania. Just turned thirty, he was by no means an unknown. He had already sung at the operas of St. Petersburg, Monte Carlo, and Buenos Aires, and was shortly due to make his Covent Garden debut. He was a busy guy. They had trouble finding a free afternoon to record ten single-sided discs. But they made the date, Gramophone Company squeamishness or not, and on Tuesday afternoon there they were, ready to roll.

The young tenor’s name—as if I have to tell anybody—was Enrico Caruso.

Caruso’s extortionist fee, so offensive to The Gramophone and Typewriter Company, was £100 for the ten-disc session. It’s a good thing that Gaisberg ignored the company’s objection. Caruso made the G&T Company very rich. They became HMV, then EMI. They recorded Callas and Klemperer and Casals and The Beatles, among others. Nowadays as the Warner Music Group they’re still going gangbusters, and they’ve got the mother of all back catalogs. All for £100. Money well spent, if you ask me.

Caruso made a lot of people very rich, including himself. He made over $2,000,000 in royalties over the next 19 years, in fact. And his recordings still sell.

Viewed solely as musical statements, those after-lunch discs from March 1902 aren’t all that impressive. Gaisberg et al. needed to get those sides onto wax as quickly as possible. Thus no retakes, no futzing about boo-boos. Caruso clears his throat quite audibly any number of times. Cottone—one of those tiresomely mediocre opera pianists—hits some brazen clunkers. The opening of E lucevan le stelle from Tosca (less than two years old at the time) is a shambles. Caruso cheats on the final note of Celeste Aïda. The audio quality isn’t anything to write home about, to say the least. The piano sounds ludicrously bad, a victim of early technology’s limitations.

But no matter. What makes these discs special, and accounts for their near-immediate hit status, was the perfect marriage of voice to medium. Caruso’s lowish tenor (not yet quite as baritonal as it would eventually become) landed right in the sweet spot of the narrow frequency range of the acoustic discs of the day. He sounds terrific: alive, young, filled with ardor, and unmistakable. Caruso died before microphones and electronic amplification transformed recording, but all that whizzy stuff wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Like John McCormack, he was a natural for the acoustic recording horn.

That’s the conjunction of the title: Caruso’s voice, the nascent technology of the 78rpm disc, and the emergent market for high-quality recordings. That afternoon, a pastime became an industry.

I have been revisiting Caruso’s recordings of late, thanks to a collection of about 300 shellac 78 rpm records put into my safekeeping. The collection includes a hefty assortment of Caruso discs—hardly surprising given his unchallenged eminence in classical recording from 1904 through about 1920. Starting in 1904 Caruso became an exclusive artist to the Victor Talking Machine company, the precursor to RCA Victor and already an industry titan. His “Red Seal” discs were the company’s mainstay: expensive, beautifully engineered, expertly pressed on high-quality materials, many of those century-plus-old discs sound as good today as they did when they were new. Actually a lot better, thanks to 21st-century playback equipment. In addition, I’m also enjoying Ward Marston’s exquisitely tuned remasterings via the 12-volume Naxos Historical set, a labor of love that extracts every possible nuance out of the old masters.

Playing a 78rpm disc, especially one from before the 1925 introduction of electric recording, is a humbling and downright moving experience. The thing is so basic, so straightforward, and yet it can produce a living, breathing musical performance. The sound comes pouring out of a wavy line carved by the fundamental principles of mechanics and etched in dried insect secretions. A 78rpm disc’s grooves stir the stylus to so much energy that you can actually hear the sound just by getting close to the disc—no amplification needed at all. That’s why old-time gramophones didn’t need any electricity. You wound up the spring-powered turntable, then plopped on a tonearm equipped with a steel or thorn needle. The sound went round and round through tubes and out via a horn (either visible on the outside or tucked inside a cabinet), picking up reflections and acoustic nuance the while, before emerging into one’s listening room. Nowadays we play those old discs with lightweight tonearms and precision-tracking cartridges with diamond stylii, sophisticated amplification circuits, speaker systems with elegant crossover networks. But none of it is absolutely necessary. Our civilization could suffer a horrendous conflagration that devolved us to pre-industrial revolution status. But axes would still chop, scythes would still cut, and Victrola gramophones would still play.

The earliest recordings were made on cylinders, the grooves moving across the coated surface like the threads on a screw. Emile Berliner’s flat discs were a commercial improvement over Edison’s cylinders, given that a flat disc can be plated and then used as a stamper for copies. Fortunately for posterity, Caruso was a flat-disc guy from the get-go.

But flat discs imposed a rat’s nest of problems. For one thing, the playback arm is pivoted from a single point and is therefore only occasionally truly tangent to the groove that it’s tracking, even though the cutting stylus travelled along a rail and was always precisely tangent to the groove. So the tracking is almost always a bit off.

Even more troubling is the diminishing amount of groove that comes under the needle as the grooves spiral inward. A bit of simple arithmetic makes clear why that would be. The disc rotates at a single speed—78 revolutions per minute. So if you’re on the outer grooves of a 12” disc, then every minute the stylus travels the circumference of a circle with a 6-inch radius. The formula for the circumference is simple: twice the radius times pi. For the outer grooves that’s (6×2)x3.14, or 37.68 inches worth of groove passing underneath the stylus in a minute’s time.

But then begin the spiral inwards. By the midpoint of the disc you have a radius of about 4 inches. That becomes (4×2)x3.14, or 25.12 inches worth of groove passing underneath the stylus in a minute’s time.

Get to the innermost grooves, and you have a radius of about 2 inches. Thus: (2×2)x3.14, or 12.56 inches worth of groove.

Since the same amount of music needs to emerge from the disc per minute (it isn’t as though the music is going to slow down), it follows that there is actually less information coming off the disc per minute as the tonearm travels inwards.

Think of it as a photograph that becomes progressively less detailed as your eye travels from the edges to the center, and you get the general drift.

Careful engineering was able to deal with some of that limitation, but inner-groove distortion is a fact of life on all flat discs; on the wide grooves and fast spin of 78rpm discs, the problem is exacerbated. Even the best playback equipment in the world can’t compensate for this one essential shortcoming.

It’s a liveable imperfection. 78 rpm discs remained the medium of choice until the late 1940s when microgrooves and tape mastering brought about recordings that could capture pretty much the entire frequency range of human hearing. Then came stereo (mid-1950s with saleable discs in 1958) and cassette tapes (late 1960s) then the whole digital revolution leading to today’s audio blizzard.

And through it all, Enrico Caruso. The man died in 1921, but his legacy lives on, right there in every record, LP, tape, CD, DVD, or download. Presumably the recording industry would have come about, eventually, without his stellar success. But it was Caruso who was the first true gramophone superstar, the artist who above all gave those flat spinning discs an aura of class and made the whole idea of recording respectable to artists throughout the world. That’s quite a gift.

And the records are still fascinating. Man, could he sing. And what a sensitive and intelligent musician he was! You don’t have to take anybody’s word for that, either: he’s still there in those old wiggly grooves, his irrepressible vitality, imagination, and superb tone production intact. Maybe we’ve had tenors since who can match him vocally (Pavarotti in his prime) but Caruso remains sui generis: the tenor of tenors, the most celebrated singer of his age and probably of all time. He is a legend, but his place in music history was truly and honestly won.

And his place in the history of recordings? He’s the patron saint, pure and simple.

Oh, look. There’s that Ulysses book. I like stuff about the Greeks. But that book’s too thick.
That’s the Iliad.
Have you read it?
Yeah.
What did you think?
It was OK.

The couple wandering the aisles of a local used bookstore and commenting loudly on whatever crossed their minds at the moment may well win the Crass Couple of the Year Award. They were neither book lovers nor shoppers. They were strollers, millennials in the very worst sense of the word—complacent, ignorant, self-confident.

Fortunately they strolled out of the store and peace again descended.

They got me thinking. (About other than some people’s apparent need to trumpet their doltishness in public, that is.) In their callowness, shallowness, and obtuseness, that obnoxious couple highlighted the biggest barrier standing between most people and great works of art, particularly music: the ignorant notion that a quick glance at or casual listen through anything is enough to back up a critical verdict. You can’t make an informed decision via breezy acquaintance. Only with steadfastness, intrepidity, and patience will the great works unfold themselves.

There was a time in my life when I didn’t know the Beethoven symphonies. By that I don’t mean that I hadn’t analyzed them or written commentaries on them. I mean that I didn’t know them at all. I had heard the first four notes of the Fifth and maybe a bit beyond that, but as I emerged from puberty, that was just about the sum total of my familiarity. Fortunately I found the opportunity to delve in more fully via Bruno Walter’s autumnal cycle with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in its bargain-basement reprint on the Odyssey label. The pressings were execrable but the performances were gold-standard and remain so to this day. One can prefer this or that approach, this or that conductor or orchestra, even this or that record label, but the Walter/Columbia have proven themselves to be remarkably durable since their birth in late 1950s Hollywood.

Critical to my development was the set’s modest price. I could actually afford it on my constrained teenage finances. Thus those benchmark performances were mine. I could zoom in and listen as much as I wanted. Go over individual movements until my ears fell off. Really get to know them, at least from listening. The time was coming when the scores themselves would prove even more valuable, but I wasn’t there yet. Not at fifteen. I just needed to get to know the Beethoven symphonies.

That isn’t to say that I mastered them—who ever has and who ever will?—but after some time I could at least identify just about any movement of the Nine with some confidence. It was a beginning, but only just. I had gone a bit deeper with some; I had imprinted them in my head, therefore I didn’t need my RCA Victor record player to relive those movements. I could play them for myself, with fair overall accuracy. (But I was still a neophyte in terms of recognizing orchestral subtleties and couldn’t have identified the individual instruments worth a dang, save obvious ones like the strings or timpani.) I was still a stumbling novice, but I had at least stepped through the monastery door.

All those years later, I still have those Walter/Columbia recordings, although I prefer the lovely recent remasterings from Sony’s Bruno Walter Edition over those tinny Odyssey LPs. It’s a sign of the hold that set had on my imagination that I kept that distinctly tattered box even when I dumped the lion’s share of my LPs during the 1990s. Nowadays I have a ton of alternate performances of each symphony, some dating all the way back to the earliest days of recording. I’ve analyzed many of the symphonies. I’ve written program notes and other commentary about them. I’ve taught them to various classes. And they remain fascinating. Their potential cannot be exhausted.

The Beethoven symphonies, just like any number of other great works of art, are never “OK.” If they were “OK” they wouldn’t be great works of art. They certainly wouldn’t have persisted for two centuries—much less the two millennia of the Homeric epics—if they were just OK. Last night’s episode of Law and Order: SVU could be OK, I suppose. As could the after-lunch latté from Starbucks.

But never the Beethoven symphonies. They are many things, to be sure. But they most emphatically are never, ever OK.

I am but a moderately-involved collector of 78-RPMs, but these days even that fleeting interest separates me from the crowd and then some. Let’s face it: most people don’t care doodley-squat about great-granny’s old 78 records: scratchy, tinny, short playing times. Heavy. Breakable. Usually dirty, dusty, and altogether icky. Even if you have a moderately modern record player, you probably can’t play them since gramophones designed for LPs can’t deal with 78s. Not only is the turntable speed all wrong, but the very stylus that tracks an LP record groove will do nothing but irreparable damage to a 78. The grooves on a 78-RPM shellac disc are vastly wider than those on an LP and require a not only a larger, but a differently-shaped stylus.

To even play a 78 RPM disc requires a certain investiture of time, money, and effort these days. It’s not as though you can run down to the corner store and buy yourself RCA’s finest gramophone for 1935. They don’t make any of that stuff any more.

Well, they almost don’t make it any more. Amazingly enough, new turntables capable of playing 78 RPM discs are out there, including the dazzling Rega Planar 78, a tip-top modern turntable that is designed to play 78s and nothing else. Several fine cartridge manufacturers, including Grado and Shure, make first-class phono cartridges with the appropriate stylii for playing 78s. You can also press a classic table, like a Technics 1200, into use as a 78-RPM table without much difficulty.

Oh, other bugboos arise, such as the fact that the equalization applied to 78s was quite different from the RIAA curve applied to LPs from the early 1950s onward. The “phonostage” amplifier—which boosts the minuscule signal coming out of the phono cartridge—is designed to work with the RIAA curve, so it’s possible that odd results will come from using a modern phonostage. But that’s easily enough remedied: nowadays equalization curves are a moment’s work to apply in software, after all. Even better, at least one of the available 78 cartridges (the Grado 78e) would appear to feature a gentle treble rolloff that complements 78s quite nicely. I use that cartridge, and I can tell you that I rarely need to re-equalize a 78 that I’ve digitized. Most of the time I’m very happy with the overall sound that comes off the needle.

RCA Victor’s extra-special “Z-Scroll” discs make up a special subset of 78s. These were manufactured during the 1930s on especially fine shellac, and were much sturdier than the norm, designed specifically for use by radio stations and in libraries where both durability and enhanced sound quality were desirable. Z-Scrolls aren’t all that common, but if you can find one in good condition, you’ve got the state of the art in disc manufacture circa 1935 or so.

You can spot a Z-Scroll by its label—the scrollwork (common to Victor, then RCA Victor, discs from about 1926 through the 1930s) is on a slightly smaller label than normal, the red-seal color is more distinctly maroon than most discs, and the “RCA Manufacturing Company” logo on the bottom is printed on an arc instead of straight across. The “z” indicating the special pressing is found on the deadwax portion of the disc—that’s the part between the end of the grooves and the label. Furthermore, as long as the disc is in good condition, it will be more shiny than your average shellac disc, almost mirror-bright in fact.

Z-Scrolls are less susceptible to surface noise and inner-groove distortion, although both are endemic to the medium and impossible to eliminate altogether. They are overall noticeably louder than regular 78s, so much so in fact that you might need to turn down your usual input volume when digitizing them.

Although every collector has his or her own strategy for digitizing 78 discs, in the case of Z-Scrolls I am committed to minimal manipulation. I’ll take care of any side-joins that are needed (78s play only four some-odd minutes to a side, and so even fairly short pieces require being broken into multiple sides) and apply very light click removal. The Grado 78e cartridge is susceptible to a faint 60 cycle hum, and so I always apply a light filter for that—just the 60-cycle fundamental and two harmonics only. Apart from ensuring a healthy overall volume level, and adding a brief fade-in and fade-out, that’s all I’m inclined to do. I’ve found that any more invasive noise removal alters the sound unacceptably. Groove noise on a Z-scroll is so faint as to be minimally distracting, so I don’t bother doing anything about it.

Here’s a Z-scroll label from 1935:

And here’s the “deadwax” area with the “z” impressed in the shellac:

When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. The repressive laws concerning women on the Elizabethan stage were lemons galore. Only men could act onstage in Shakespeare’s England. Lady Macbeth was played by a guy. So was Cleopatra. So was Juliet. Tom Stoppard made wonderful hay of that conundrum in his screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love.” But the playwright who made the most of it was Shakespeare himself. Faced with the necessity of using young men for his female roles, Shakespeare took charge of the situation in his comedies and had himself a ball with gender-bending.

And in no play is the gender-bend more dazzling than Twelfth Night. For my money it presents the most delectably intricate plot amongst the comedies, and certainly holds the prize for sheer number of gender-bending combos. Oh, it may not quite achieve the layers of As You Like It with the male actor actor portraying Rosalind who disguises herself as (male) Ganymede in the Forest of Aden and then play-acts as (female again) Rosalind to help her lovesick swain Orlando with his wooing—that is, if Orlando were ever to be able to woo Rosalind in person, since Orlando thinks that Ganymede is a guy. Well Ganymede is a guy, but actually that’s because he’s a guy playing a girl who dresses up as a guy and then play-acts as a girl. Surely that one character takes gender-bending about as far as it can go.

But while As You Like It might win the depth prize, Twelfth Night has got it in spades for the combos. Consider:

Viola (guy portraying girl) is shipwrecked on Illyria and takes on the protective guise of Cesario, a male. So that’s two levels of bend (male to female to male) right there.

Viola-as-Cesario (guy portraying girl dressed up as guy) enters the service of Duke Orsino (guy portraying guy).

Viola-as-Cesario quickly falls in love with Duke Orsino. Intriguingly, Duke Orsino begins responding to Viola-as-Cesario’s interest, although it never progresses all that far. Nonetheless, Duke Orsino (guy portraying guy) appears to be attracted to Cesario, who Orsino at least thinks is a guy. Well, he is I suppose: a guy portraying a girl who is dressed up like a guy. But Orsino (as a character) appears to be attracted to Cesario (as a character) who is also a guy. So we have some guy-guy stuff here. Except that Cesario (as a character) is actually Viola-in-male-drag, so it’s guy-girl stuff. But let’s keep our ducks in a row here: both Viola and Orsino are guys—at least insofar as their “real” selves, i.e., the actors playing the parts.

I hope you’re keeping all this lined up. It gets MUCH more complicated very quickly. Duke Orsino is in the throes of a mad passion for high-born neighbor lady Olivia, who won’t give him so much as the time of day. So Orsino decides to take another tack, which is to send Cesario—who is a softly attractive boy (so Orsino thinks, anyway)—to try his luck pressing Orsino’s suit with Olivia.

Keep clear who’s who and what’s what. Cesario (who is really Viola) is going to woo Olivia. That’s because Orsino thinks that Cesario is a guy, and Olivia will have no reason to think otherwise. But Cesario knows that he’s really a girl, and so this is going to be a girl wooing another girl. Right? Except that they’re both guys.

So off Cesario (male-to-female-to-male) goes to woo Olivia (male-to-female) for Orsino. And what do you know? Olivia starts falling for Cesario. Let’s get this clear, now. Olivia is a female character, but she’s being played by a guy. Cesario is a guy (at least so Olivia thinks) whose actually a girl (according to the script) who is actually played by a guy. So within this one pairing we have a little interesting touch of lesbianism (Olivia as female, Cesario as female underneath the male drag) along with the same frisson of male-male attraction that makes the Cesario-Orsino combo so enticing. At some level Cesario’s a soft young male and Olivia’s a slightly older female. But they’re actually both guys. So there you have it: one heterosexual combo and both flavors of homosexual pairings, all in the same couple. That’s kinky even by San Francisco standards.

Whew. Shakespeare could have stopped there, but he was Shakespeare and not some Joe Blow who took the easy way out. Oh, no. Shakespeare had to create a Viola who is a close twin to her brother Sebastian—whom she assumes has perished in the shipwreck, as Sebastian assumes of her. Now remember that they’re actually both guys, right—at least the actors are. If the director has been able to cast a pair of male twins in the roles of Sebastian and Viola, so much the better, but least the actors should be spitting images of each other. Give them both long hair and few other distinguishing characteristics, except for some minor costume differences, and you’ve got it made. It should take some concentration for the audience to distinguish Sebastian-as-himself from Viola-as-Cesario.

So (male-male) Sebastian happens to chance upon Olivia (male-female). She still thinks that he’s Cesario (male-female-male), and so she presses her love for him and he—a casually opportunistic chap, it would appear—agrees to marry her right then and there. So now note that you have a normal boy-girl relationship. Except that Olivia thinks that Sebastian is Cesario, who is also a female somewhere in there. Except, of course, they’re both actually guys. There are no simple gender relationships in this play.

Breathe for a moment before continuing, OK? All right now? We continue: Sebastian was rescued from the sea by Antonio, who has healed him, coddled him, and loved him. I suppose we aren’t supposed to read too much into Antonio’s love for Sebastian, but with modern audiences it plays a lot better to give Antonio a bit of the love-sick swain aspect in regards to Sebastian. Antonio is a career sailor, after all, and Sebastian is a spectacularly pretty youth, just as his twin sister Viola-as-Cesario is a spectacularly pretty youth. And Sebastian owes Antonio his very life. And Antonio’s kinda lonely. So come on, now: I’m perfectly capable of putting two and two together and no doubt Shakespeare expected an Elizabethan audience to perform the same very simple arithmetic.

Anyway. I submit that there has been a love affair, however brief and however around the edges, between Sebastian and Antonio. And that one’s the only non-bender in the show: they’re both guys as characters, and they’re both guys in real life as actors. But wouldn’t you know it: that’s the only love affair that doesn’t work out and isn’t consummated, as they say, as the curtain falls? Antonio, a saintlike character and the very soul of generosity, is the only major character who is uncoupled at play’s end. Several productions I’ve seen end with him sitting alone on the stage, looking forlorn. Of all the characters in the play he most deserves to get his heart’s desire, and he doesn’t. Dammit. You kinda want Olivia’s young servant Fabian to go over and sit in his lap as the curtain falls.

Then there’s Maria, Olivia’s lady-in-waiting. She has been having an on-again, off-again affair with Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s uncle who is on an extended visit to his niece. I guess Shakespeare recognized that Twelfth Night’s cast of mostly young, beautiful, and emotionally sincere people needed at least one negative character for balance. Shakespeare, never one to fart around, created in Toby Belch one of the most unpleasant characters in all the comedies. Sir Toby is matched only by dastardly Prince John in Much Ado About Nothing, but whereas John is warped by envy of his golden-boy older brother, Toby Belch is just your basic asshole, an ugly drunk and callous freeloader. Maria—part comic sidekick, part spiteful bitch—winds up marrying Toby before the final curtain falls. They’re both guys, remember.

To appreciate Twelfth Night in all its gender twists, you really must see the glorious all-male production from Shakespeare’s Globe in London. With a dream cast headed up by the sublime Mark Rylance as the most dazzling Olivia imaginable and Stephen Fry as a perfectly-pitched Malvolio, this is the Twelfth Night that dreams are made on. Olivia’s solo scene immediately after her first meeting with Cesario is worth the DVD price alone. Hell, it would be worth flying to London, popping for a hotel room, and getting tickets to the Globe for this one scene, in which the oh-so-frozen Olivia goes momentarily, and hysterically, unglued as she realizes that she has developed a near-instantaneous and hormone-erupting yen for Cesario. And it’s only one marvelous moment amongst many. I can’t keep wondering what old Will himself would have to say about Rylance’s performance: perhaps something along the lines of Zounds, I had no idea that character could be so incredibly funny, and so heartbreakingly real. Bravissimo!