I've been reluctantly shuffling through stacks of cassette tapes of my own performances over the years, some being my yearly faculty recitals at the SF Conservatory, others chamber performances of various sorts together with a smattering of appearances with larger ensembles. The earliest tape I have dates from 1971 when I was a senior in high school, with the bulk starting in 1975. I have no audio documents from my time at Baltimore's Peabody Institute.

I describe myself as reluctant because I detest my piano playing from before the mid-1990s. Despite fleeting tolerable moments, it was for the most part steely, aggressive, strident, and far too obsessed with technical bling for its own good. I quit the piano in 1990 and promised myself that I would give myself five years without giving recitals before reassessing the situation. The need for such a drastic step is abundantly—and painfully—on display via the tape of a faculty recital from January 9, 1989. It is the playing of a man who absolutely loathes the instrument but doesn't actually know that his heart is filled with aversion. I don't believe I have ever heard a more ruthless traversal of the first Chopin scherzo; hysterically paced, machine-gunned down by brutally insensitive fingers, slammed and slapped and slandered into cringing submission, it's not so much an interpretation as a mugging. The Bach A-minor Partita that opens the program has a few decent moments (both the Allemande and Sarabande are at least sensitive albeit mannered) but overall does little but snarl and tear at the music. And as for Bartók's Out of Doors Suite—well. No point even talking about that.

It's all so clear to me now. I completely jumped the track at one point in my development. I can even spot precisely when it was: my relocation to California. I was languishing at Peabody, but I would have begun to draw out of what was undoubtedly a temporary funk. I had required a complete rebuilding during my Freshman year, and I had started to wake up musically during my Sophomore year. By the end of that year I was playing well enough but without individuality; the renovation was finished but I had yet to move into my new digs. I was working with a staunchly anti-virtuoso teacher who was feeding me a solid diet of Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven while keeping me resolutely away from the slam-bang virtuoso stuff. Everything was geared towards listening and thinking and feeling. Yes, I was a tad frigid. But I would have thawed out. I should have stayed put.

Instead, I came West and deliberately chose teachers that I knew would be permissive. I resolutely refused to study with the one teacher at the SF Conservatory who would have been perfect for me—not because I disliked him, but because he was a strong advocate of that same Austro-Germanic mindset and literature, and I wanted a break from all that. Well, I got my break. It was the worst possible thing for me at the time, but of course I didn't know that.

I was appointed to the faculty of the SF Conservatory at a far-too tender age and started serving as my own mentor and guide. That's par for the course, but I sure made some cruddy decisions, the worst of which was to cultivate high-voltage virtuosity. I became obsessed with technique. I started chowing down those murderous Godowsky studies that bitch-slap multiple Chopin etudes into one box, not because I liked the obnoxious things, but because most pianists couldn't handle them. I played the two Charles Ives sonatas in graduate school, again not out of artistic longing (to be honest I've never liked either of them) but because nobody else had the chops. I kept doing that sort of thing—playing catastrophically gnarly piano music such as the Granados Goyescas, the Godowsky paraphrase of Kunstlerleben, big modernist stuff such as the Copland Piano Fantasy and the Sessions Second Sonata. I practiced torrentially and incessantly, always honing velocity and flash and bling.

I never stopped to consider what all that was doing to my musical sensibility. I ignored the warning signs: practice sessions characterized by fits of irritation, chain smoking, and obsessive repetition; an ever-shortening fuse that ignited sharp mood swings; mannered, harsh, and ridiculously athletic recitals. Occasionally I emerged from my self-plumbed sewer, such as in the mid-1980s when I put on a series of four recitals devoted to the complete piano music of Debussy. But only occasionally. Mostly that stack of cassettes is a big pile o' ugly.

I was never cut out to be a virtuoso-type pianist. I was always at my best as a player of lyrical music, stuff requiring more brains and heart than fingers. My biggest success at Peabody was the Schubert B-flat posthumous piano sonata, hardly repertoire suitable for a piano-trash headbanger. Furthermore I've always been a fertile improviser at the keyboard. It all makes sense if you consider that my basic gift in music was more as a composer than as a performer, although I never actively pursued composition. (That's one decision I've never regretted.) Gee-whiz virtuosity is simply not my thing; I have neither the build nor the mindset for it. And yet there I was, whacking away until all hours, honing and strengthening and sharpening, defiantly swimming upstream against the flow of my own inner nature.

I was a fundamentally non-athletic type trying to become a football quarterback. All that could happen was that I would hurt myself in the process, and hurt myself I did. I got sick. The damage wasn't physical, however; I'm immune to repetitive-stress impairments or the like. My wound was deeper and harder to cure, because what I hurt was my heart. That cassette tape from January 1989 documents the diseased playing of a damaged musician.

Fortunately I wasn't bound to the piano for my living, and so when in 1990 I quit the instrument I could do so without hardship. I made a gentle return in 1995, then quit again for a few years more. I have never resumed regular playing. The separation empowered me to discover my true musical nature; not specifically one thing or another, I'm a generalist who is comfortable with a wide range of activity. I never would have been more than a middling pianist, nor have I ever been much as a piano teacher, but I'm jim-dandy in a classroom and a hellzapoppin' public lecturer. What I'm not is a pianist.

Nowadays I play about once a year, provided I feel like it. If I don't, I don't. There was a brief period during which I was encouraging composition majors by playing their works, but I have called a halt to that as well; some kids, understandably jazzed by the prospect of being played by a senior faculty member, overreached and dropped me into the purgatory of slugging it out with a ferociously difficult piece, all the more bothersome since I no longer had those quicksilver chops I had wasted so many years developing. So no more of that. It's just too risky.

Next year I'll be playing another faculty recital, my first in several years. On the bill will be works that require honed musicianship and tonal imagination but only modest technical accoutrements. The stuff I should have been playing all along, in other words. There's a good chance that I'll be able to tolerate listening to the recording of the recital, as has been the case with bits 'n' pieces of recitals from the past ten some-odd years. The January 2013 recital may be the last time I ever play the piano in public. That doesn't bother me in the slightest. After all, I'm not a pianist.

Oh, dang. I just hate it when audiophile snake oil turns out to be useful lotion. High-end audio is pestered by so much crackpottery, so many stratospherically expensive magic bullets, so much plain old BS. But just because there's nothing to be gained by running a green pen around the edges of a CD (a musty and happily discredited bit of audiophoolery) it doesn't follow that every spooky little prejudice espoused by audiophiles is moonshine.

No more tiresome, thrashed-through and picked-over topic exists in audiophilia than the effect of cables. There are those who will insist that a coat hanger will pass current along just as well as some ritzy puppy that costs $8000 for 10 feet. Others will say that yes, there is a difference—but it becomes increasingly subtle as one climbs the price scale. At least that last is reflected in reality: there's a much bigger perceivable difference between stereos costing $500 and $5000 than there is between a $5000 stereo and a $50,000 one. The situation is a bit like cars: you go from el-cheapo rattletrap to a Honda Accord and you've made a gigantic leap upwards. But go from that Accord to a Mercedes Benz and the differences aren't anywhere near as dramatic, although they're most certainly there.

I am no golden-ear type. Musicians rarely are. We're just too busy listening to the content of the music to be all that bothered with trifling issues such as a 1.45 decibel blare at 1.54 kilohertz or a slight flattening of the soundstage when the speakers are toed in an extra 2 degrees. Still, I can appreciate good sound equipment, nor have I any truck with audio trailer trash. I can hear the difference between a hawk and a handsaw. I'm accustomed to hearing pretty darn good stuff. Concerning cables, however, I dwell solidly in the skeptical camp. Or at least I did.

Yesterday my spring cleaning took me into my home office where I performed a considerable shuffling about, dusting off, and general lightening up operation. In the process, I realized that the unsightly cables connecting my B&W 805D speakers to the Arcam integrated amp needed replacing. One of the cables was wantonly displaying nude wire through a missing patch of insulation and the other was disfigured by a blobby black tape-wrapped splice. Neither cable had been all that exalted to begin with, and in their dotage both had become quite the droopy old pair of sad sacks.

So I decided to replace them with new, decent-quality but non-exalted 16-gauge speaker wire. I took care assembling the cables, affixing high-quality banana plugs for the amplifier end and lugs on the speaker end. I got the whole shebang set up and gave it a listen.

To my dismay, my B&Ws had gone on a catastrophic crash diet. It was as though the entire bass range had been throttled back. They didn't sound like B&Ws any more. They were thin, parched, shadows of their curvaceous former selves. I doubled-checked the cables to make sure that I hadn't goofed up, but no. The cables were assembled and connected correctly. They just weren't doing as good a job as the old ones.

That's annoying. One doesn't choose B&W 805's out of a casual disregard for sound quality. 805Ds are indisputably classy speakers, bonafide musical instruments, plush and vivaciously expressive despite being "bookshelf" models that sit on stands. Anything that diminishes their considerable glory is a cause for concern. I was concerned.

Today I visited the audiophile retail universe and acquired AudioQuest cables, thick jobbers, well-insulated and made of altogether posh and pure copper. I assembled my cables using brand-new AudioQuest end pieces. I did a really good job. They look spiffy as hell.

And my 805s were back in business, full-bodied and rich and suave and just brimming over with all that bewitching Bowers & Wilkins voodoo. They sounded like themselves again, free of the sonic chastity belt had been clipped on to their underparts by the cheap cables.

Now, the AudioQuest cable isn't ridiculously expensive. A thirty-foot reel was well under $100. I spent about $120 all told, counting the high-quality end connectors and sales tax. The 16-gauge cable and connectors came in at about $40. Thus it was an $80 difference. But that $80 separated singing from straining.

The moral: yes, cables do make a difference. At least going from the equivalent of a itty-bitty super-economy car to a midrange Honda Accord. I'm still inclined to draw the line right about there: just as I haven't the slightest intention to pop for a Mercedes Benz, I will not be throwing away 8 grand on a stupid goddamn piece of wire. Cables may not be altogether snake oil, but neither am I altogether off my rocker. Moderation in all things, even audiophilia.

Commentarial analysis is one of the things I do. I write analyses and assess the analyses of others, particularly my own students. I am scrupulous to avoid hardcore academic analysis, just as I am scrupulous to avoid hardcore academic anything. I am a blue-collar musician, a working stiff kind of guy, not an effete leather-patched pontiff holding forth in the musty confines of a seminar room. I try to reach ordinary human beings with my commentary. Even if I am obliged to wade through academic treacle on my way to the cold clear water of understanding, I take pains to remove the stickiness from my own presentations. I'm careful to impart that same caution to my students, who may be tempted by academic gobbledegook's potential for masking creative sterility.

I recognize that analytic writing is just about as difficult as it gets, especially when the subject matter is fraught with technicalities. Very few writers pull it off successfully. Donald Francis Tovey was a grand master of the art, his style honed by both a superb education in English prose and his educated readership at the Leeds Festival. His multi-volume "Essays in Musical Analysis" is a collection of his program notes for the Leeds Festival, written back in the days when program notes were technical, high-toned, and bristling with musical examples. We don't do that nowadays.

Tovey's secret was to use clear and friendly prose that avoided pomposities while embracing the occasional high-toned adjective, such as his glorious description of the Haydn "Surprise" symphony's variation theme as displaying anserine solemnity. (Nota bene: "anserine" means "goose-like.") He never hesitated to toss in an opinion, always maintaining a personal tone. I'll be the first to admit that some of his observations aren't necessarily defensible. But they add much-needed color and vitality. Consider this gem from his article on the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto:

"The finale breaks in, pianissimo, with an intensely lively theme in that prosaic daylight by which Beethoven loves to test the reality of his sublimest visions."

Everything after the word "theme" is at least fluff if not downright nonsense. I seriously doubt that LvanB sat there at his composition desk muttering: Let's surround this here thing with prosaic daylight so I can test the reality of this sublime vision of mine. Nonetheless, it's a nifty way to point out that the theme is given a humdrum, almost colorless setting.

In contrast I offer this blob of glutinous academic prose, taken from a textbook that shall remain nameless, written by authors who shall remain anonymous:

"Different from movements that emphasize compression for the early portions of a recapitulation are those that indulge in a so-called secondary development, digressing from the original order of events by interpolating a stretch of motivic elaboration, heightened ensemble activity, or tonal enrichment."

Sheesh, what a stuffed shirt. The meaning is clear enough but the prose reeks of pomposity and intellectual entitlement. You want to slap the author. Well, at least I do.

Analytic writers resort to a variety of approaches to avoid the tiresome slough of blow-by-blow musical commentary. Over the years I have come to identify four tropes that pop up regularly. None are all that objectionable unless they are used consistently, in which case they become irritating mannerisms. I try to avoid them in my own writing, with varying degrees of success.

Start with this passage from from Tovey's analysis of the Brahms B-flat Piano Concerto:

"There are no trumpets and drums in this finale. Neither are there any storms. There is abundance of young energy and grace, and there is all that greatness of design which, as Mozart and the Greeks have proved, is unfailingly sublime, whatever the ostensible range of the subject."

I'll try re-writing it to demonstrate each of the four approaches in turn.

The Royal 'We'

"We will hear no trumpets or drums in this finale. Neither will we hear any storms. We will hear an abundance of young energy and grace…"

The royal 'we' is encountered in student writing with distressing regularity. "Our primary theme is in G Major, and we can see that it outlines the tonic triad." At its best, the royal 'we' is unnoticeable and even friendly, such as Tovey's "When the strings join in, the calm is as deep as the ocean that we have witnessed in the storms of this huge piece of music." But it can get out of hand all too easily, resulting in analysis that sounds like an imperious arts-dragon lady pontificating for the Tuesday Club For the Propagation and Dissemination of the Fine Arts.

The Lonely 'One"

"One will encounter no trumpets and drums in this finale. Neither will one hear any storms. One hears an abundance of young energy…"

One doesn't encounter this one too often in professional writing. One finds that, as a rule, one's editor takes a red pencil to one's prose and banishes the lonely 'one' to limbo. Which is a very good thing indeed. However, a bit of fun is there for the having, just by replacing all incidences of "one" with a chap: "A chap will encounter no trumpets and drums in this finale. Neither will a chap hear any storms." How plummy, how charming in its turgid Colonel Blimp-y way.

I Proclaim

"I note that there are no trumpets or drums in this finale. Nor have I found any storms. I consider this finale to contain an abundance of young energy, much as I have heard a greatness of design which I discern in Mozart and the Greeks, and which I refer to as unfailingly sublime, whatever I might consider to be the ostensible range of the subject."

In light doses, the injection of the author's persona is unobjectionable and even refreshing. But a soupçon slops over into an overdose all too easily, as a confidential tone morphs into egomaniacal posturing. I Proclaim puts even the friendliest writer at risk of unleashing a smug little twit. Tovey falls prey to an attack of twittiness on occasion: "I will leave this great and childlike finale to call forth the right emotions without further analysis in words." So Donny-o, I suppose you'll smite me if I call forth the wrong emotion?

He Did It

"Beethoven required no trumpets or drums in this finale. Neither did he seek any storms. Instead, Beethoven embraced an abundance of young energy and grace…"

Also known as the Vulcan Mind-Meld, He Did It trephines the composer's skull and inserts thoughts, ideas, motivations, and intentions. My first Tovey quote provides an example, as "Beethoven loves to test the reality of his sublimest visions." The advantage of He Did It is a sense of ownership over the material, an almost chummy relationship with the creator that, being wholly imaginary, is subject to neither proof nor disproof. Beethoven, having been dust for a good long time, cannot object to any thoughts I might give him. He Did It is common, with the result that most folks blip right over it without a moment's notice. Nor is He Did It without validity; there is nothing whatsoever objectionable about bringing commentarial observations about a composer's habits into the discussion, as long as those observations don't expand into fantasy. Tovey: "Mozart had a gentle vein of irony which often goes with a long range of prophetic vision, and we may take it that when he inscribes the first movement of this Concerto in G major allegro maestoso he writes the inscription with his tongue in his cheek." As entertaining as that sentence may be, it edges into Star Trek territory. It's one thing to describe Mozart's "gentle vein of irony" but another thing entirely to state that he was being satirical in a tempo marking; neither Mr. Tovey nor anyone else could have possibly known that.

Is good analytic writing even possible? Sure it is—but it requires skill, attention, and a dab of artistry. I offer Brahms: The Four Symphonies by Walter Frisch as my candidate for overall excellence in analytic prose. Consider this paragraph, taken more or less at random, from Frisch's coverage of the finale of the Fourth Symphony:

"It is striking—and surely not coincidental—that Brahms's adaptation of sonata form in this movement has the same features as the third movement of the symphony, in which the main theme reappears in the tonic at the start of the development and the recapitulation beings at that point in the first group where the theme has broken off at the start of the development. Here the ostinato returns literally for the first four measures of variation 16, and the recapitulation begins at variation 24 with a reworking of variation 1. The variation form, made up of smaller, independent units, adapts itself ideally to this kind of structure."

Frisch's book is aimed at professionals rather than general readers, but nonetheless he maintains a readable and clear style throughout, even considering the technical nature of his prose. The non-technical portions of his work are even more readable yet no less rich in content. Frisch makes use of He Did It as necessary, but never slops into Vulcan Mind Melds. The Royal 'We' and The Lonely 'One' are (thankfully) absent, nor is Frisch inclined towards I Proclaim. It's a breathtaking accomplishment, but its virtue is not necessarily immediately apparent to the reader. That's how it should be: good analysis writing is, in the final analysis (so to speak), good writing.

A veneer of nostalgia envelops today's reborn interest in vinyl LPs. Pawing around used-record bins is downright therapeutic, an audio version of that utterly civilized pastime, book collecting. Beyond the basic relaxation that comes from that steady flip-flip through the jackets, one might find a rarity, become reacquainted with a loved childhood record, or snag a jewel at a bargain-bin price. It's a delightful whole made up of delectable parts.

Nevertheless, for Those of a Certain Age, records weren't nostalgic. They were brand new. They belonged to the here and now, just as much as a quart of milk or a bunch of fresh celery. They came encased in shrink wrap, the cardboard fresh and white, the jacket art crisp and clear and unsullied. The record inside was shiny and unmarked, fresh off the press and never played. For most of today's vinyl enthusiasts, newness isn't part of the equation. LPs are secondhand; LPs are links to the past; LPs are of indeterminate quality. No matter how pretty the surface might look in the reflections from Amoeba's embalming-room flourescent lighting, you can't be sure that those microscopic grooves haven't been visited with sustained abuse. Only a playing will tell if you have music or a scratch-and-click fest.

Happily, brand spanking new LPs are once more available. Nowadays they're produced by specialist outfits, by folks who bring a discerning audiophile sensibility to what used to be a mass-market product. More often than not new LPs will be pressed on 100% fresh, or "virgin" vinyl, as opposed to the 70/30 mix of fresh to repurposed vinyl that was the norm in the past. Not only that, but the 120 gram weights of yesteryear have been replaced by 180 gram weights. That extra mass may or may not improve the overall sound quality—personally I rather doubt that it does—but it stands witness to the fit 'n' finish that modern-day vinyl producers are bringing to their pressings. If nothing else, the extra thickness renders the LP that much more resistant to reciprocal vibrations, as the stylus in the groove imparts some of its jiggle right back into the record.

Many of today's heavyweight audiophile records dip into yesterday's catalogs. That makes perfect sense: vinyl LPs are analog rather than digital, after all, so it's in everybody's best interest to maintain a 100% analog chain throughout. Besides, there's a lot to be said for the stellar achievements of firms such as Decca, DGG, RCA, and Mercury back in the all-analog days. A lot of people today just don't know how glorious a brand-new Polydor pressing of a Deutsche Grammophon album could sound, before time and usage started taking its toll. That's not to say that you can't find a mint-condition original DGG that provides audio thrills galore, but most surviving specimens have seen better times.

That's where a new 180-gram pressing comes in handy. You can hear Ansermet's London blue-backs in all their pristine majesty, in all likelihood sounding better in their current incarnations than they ever did in the past. Disc noise is minimal; you hear mostly the tape hiss from the original masters. The surface is not only quiet, but clear; the strings sing out without the slightest ragged edge, the percussion transients glitter in the air, the soundstage is not only wide but deep. Mercury Living Presence LPs from the later 1950s and into the 1960s reveal all their startling clarity without the slight blare that seems to accompany a fair number of the digital remasterings—good though those are. The midrange-rich glide of an RCA Living Stereo is unmistakable whether on CD, SACD, or LP—but somehow it works better on an LP. Maybe it's the combination of the undercurrent of groove swoosh and that buttery RCA house sound.

Audiophile LPs are addictive. I treated myself to an even dozen lately, ranging from Ansermet on Decca to Fricsay on DGG, Klemperer on EMI, Dorati and Skrowaczewski in Minneapolis on Mercury, and even a delectable period piece—"The American Scene" from Mantovani and His Orchestra, perfectly recorded by Decca/London and given a ritzy gatefold album treatment, as befitted that most reliable of cash cows with his cascading strings and luminous orchestrations. Sophisticated it ain't, but it shoor is purty.

It isn't strictly necessary to pop the typically $30-plus purchase price for an audiophile-grade LP to get near-perfect analog sound. I have an original of the Mercury Dorati/LSO album of Copland's Rodeo and El Salon Mexico that plays as well as any 180-gram audiophile item in my collection. My Karajan/Berlin set of the Brahms symphonies on DGG sounds as if it came off the production line yesterday. Throughout my LP collection I find records that have sailed down fifty years or more with hardly an audio blip or stain. Some were high-class affairs when new, others were humble items from second-tier labels that were given first-tier pressings and have been kept safe & sound all these years. That's the thing about LPs: you never really know. Even when they're new problems can crop up, such as a mold that wasn't perfectly filled by the stamper, or poor-grade vinyl, or just a lousy original mastering and recording.

Audiophile LPs represent a kind of Honor Roll for fine recordings. A company such as Speakers Corner isn't about to release a 180-gram pressing of an album that wasn't much good to begin with, after all. As a rule, audiophile LPs will at least sound very good from a purely sonic point of view, no matter what you might wind up thinking of the performance. So they're fun to have around, and offer a lot of bang for their (considerable) buck.

At any rate, if you have a quality LP record player, you owe it to yourself to acquire at least a few modern-day audiophile LPs of grand classics. Consider the Kertesz/VPO of the Dvorak "New World" Symphony, on Decca—a stunning performance from the early 1960s captured by Decca's very best engineers. Originals in good condition demand a stiff price on the used-record marketplace, but for $35 you can get the Speakers Corner reissue, indistinguishable from the original except for the significantly higher quality vinyl itself. To be sure, the album is also available in a beautifully remastered CD for less than half the price. So maybe the LP is just nostalgic silliness. But perhaps it's nostalgia in a good cause, as it preserves a nearly-vanished pleasure of our collective past: the fun of buying a brand-new record, splitting open the shrink-wrap, and spinning that sucker for the very first time.

Kertesz/VPO in audiophile-grade vinyl: sonic heaven

“It’s so bland,” said one student. “It’s so predictable,” said another. “It just so…yecch…nice!” said yet another, his lip curling in disdain.

And indeed much of it is bland, predictable, nice-y nice. Saccharine, even. But it is the music of profound social change nonetheless. I speak of the Galant style, that typically decorous and attractive music that played such an important part in setting the stage for Viennese Classicism. Foreshadowed by the elegant gentility of Italian baroque masters such as Corelli, Galant art flourished in the years between the late Baroque and the full flowering of Viennese Classicism in the 1770s, best practiced by composers who are now considered lesser lights of the era but who were, in fact, estimable musicians and highly polished composers. Wagenseil, Toeschi, Holzbauer, Monn, Gossec, JC Bach, Abel, Arne, Herschel, Hoffman, Ordoñez, Leclair. That's just a start; there were many more, gentlemanly composers all, producing a steady stream of symphonies and chamber pieces and piano pieces and serenades and divertimenti and concertos. Nor was Galant an all-or-nothing affair; composers could write in a Galant style one day and the more turbulent Empfindsamer stil (style of sensibility) the next. The great lights of the later Viennese Classical might well incorporate Galant moods or gestures in their music, as was the case with Haydn, Mozart, Vanhal, and even Beethoven—at least in his early years. It was a pan-European, pan-continental style, the Galant, practiced in New and Old Worlds alike, familiar to all listeners wherever Western culture and its art music had taken hold.

To understand the social significance of the Galant style, a glance at the overall European situation is in order. Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Natures" reproduces a bevy of graphs that document a notable cessation of public violence and injustice during the second half of the 18th century. Some sociologists have dubbed the era as the beginning of the Humanitarian Revolution, a time when the worth of the individual life came to be valued over the worth of the individual soul. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason: whatever we choose to call it, the late 18th century saw an overturning of ages-old practices of casual cruelty at both the public and private level. Public executions began falling out of favor. Persecutions of heretics, burning of witches, animals brutalized as public entertainments, all mostly faded out before the dawn of the 19th century. Judicial torture, for long a mainstay of the legal system, had been retreating for a good long time but by the days of Voltaire was finally coming to an end. And even if chattel slavery was still alive and kicking, at the very least sensible people were speaking out against it—a new development in the history of humanity.

This overall softening of human nature, this move away from publicly-sanctioned violence and cruelty, was accompanied by growth in manuals on etiquette—a word which carried a great deal more weight in those days than it does now. To us, "etiquette" means Emily Post or Miss Manners and is all about which fork to use at a formal dinner or how to write an appropriate thank-you note. To earlier eras, etiquette was about avoiding grave offense that could lead to bloodshed. Students of medieval culture are only too familiar with the volatility of the folks of the middle ages. Barbara Tuchmann speaks of their childishness, in the way that they could be jolly and friendly one instant, seething with rage and tearing up the room the next. Emotions were unchecked, untrammeled, very much on the surface. People were armed with knives and swords, and they knew how to use them. In fact, men continued to wear swords as late as the first half of the 18th century; both Handel and Bach were engaged in impromptu street swordfighting in their youth, and yet they were educated, sensible men and certainly not violent street-rabble types. The "code duello" that took the life of Alexander Hamilton lingered on well into the nineteenth century.

Germanophone Europe had just recently emerged from a series of horrific religious wars that are bundled up with the tidy label “The Thirty Years War” but which were actually longer than thirty years, and they weren't really wars. They were genocides, holocausts, scorched-earth annihilations. They drained the economies of their respective countries and tallied up horrific death rates, up to a third or more of their populations. They were brutal, seething with almost unimaginable cruelties and disregard for human dignity or decency. There is nothing nastier than a religious war, and in the Wars of Religion of the 17th century Europe turned into killing field.

In the slow rebound that followed the Treaty of Westphalia, a new European order emerged that was less tribal, less local, less obsessed about religion and more concerned with the creation of stable and responsibly-governed societies. It was just a start, but the flowering of the German High Baroque, and its successor the Viennese Classical, could not have taken place in the atrocity-soaked horror of the Wars of Religion. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Humanitarian Revolution, all emerge from a Europe seared and scarred by its nightmares.

Enlightenment ideals postulated a humanity freed from superstition and governed by reason and dignity. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, says one of the talismanic documents of Enlightenment philosophy. Such lofty goals were impossible to achieve, much less maintain, if people behaved like the aristocrats of Romeo and Juliet who explode into a savage street battle within the first few minutes of the play, all over a few casual insults. A civil society is impossible if people are incapable of being civil. But that was all changing, and it was all changing fast. I may be indulging in a platitude here, but it seems that childishly reactive people were at last starting to grow up, at least a little bit.

The elaborate manners and social stratification that characterize genteel 18th century life are part of that growing up process. People were learning how to behave at both the micro and macro levels. For an example of the micro level, consider that as recently as the Renaissance it wasn't considered offensive to defecate into a chamber pot right at the dinner table, even in upper-class households. But that wouldn't have been the case at a Jefferson family dinner at Monticello. At the macro level, consider the advance in basic human rights enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, particularly its first ten amendments.

At this point I move past background and into my own esthetic reactions, opinions, and impressions. For me, the refined clarity of the Galant style, with its carefully-balanced forms, uncomplicated yet attractive harmonic language, scrupulous avoidance of coarse emotions, transparent instrumental writing, variety in materials, elaboration in the place of motivic development, and reliance of homophonic texture over polyphony, expresses in music the same careful control and emphasis on civility that characterized Enlightenment ideals. I am reminded of a tour I took of the San Francisco Zen Center, which is housed in a lovely building designed by eminent Bay Area architect Julia Morgan. How does one make a Zen temple out of a Julia Morgan building, asked our tour guide. By the way we live in it, he answered. The way we move about the building, enter a room using this foot, bow in this way, the care we take to maintain a quiet, unhurried life. Living a meditative life is all about form and intention, and that was, in a nutshell, pretty much what Enlightenment social engineers were doing with their elaborate courtesies, elevated standards of deportment, and love of delicately complex ornamentation. An 18th century porcelain, all pale and fragile and lined with delicate streaks of gold amidst the fluffy pink and blue accents, is a thing that must be handled with care and respect. It isn't functional; neither tool nor implement, its purpose is to be appreciated, protected, and maintained. Those eggshell-thin surfaces, those twee poses and studiedly bland facial expressions, bear potent witness to a fundamental change in human society: those little figurines cannot survive in a violent or careless world. Like household Buddhas or Kuan Yen statues, they serve as reminders for us to maintain our cool, to avoid causing offense, and to do our part to help create a just society in which barbaric brutality can be kept firmly at bay.

And what are those delicately predictable cadences of a Galant minuet, the pale descending scales and concluding cadential 64 figures, the paper-thin textures and simple harmonies, but yet another reminder, this time expressed in sound? You can destroy the mood of a Galant andante with one harsh word or gesture; they require being heard in a relatively small, quiet room. They do not render up their subtleties easily; you must pay attention. Nor are they puzzle-boxes filled with hidden meanings. They are what they are; graceful, gracious, ingratiating confections to be savored in the moment. Think of them as ambassadors of peace. Think of them as earth-grounded Tibetan monks. Think of them as Zen masters presiding over a sesshin. Think of them as antennas that broadcast cool rays that dampen any tension or simmering violence in the room.

But don't think of them as bland or predictable. That doesn't do them justice, not by a long shot. In their very predictability they tell us that over the long haul, reason and compassion are prevailing over human brutality. They have become oh-so familiar sounding to us, so cool and flavorless and cookie-cutter-ish. We take them for granted, just as we take the ideals they exemplify for granted. Despite numerous incidences of falling off the wagon—Napoleonic Europe, World Wars—humanity has come a long, long way since we all shrieked with delighted laughter as a screaming cat was slowly burned to death in front of us. We have learned, at least in part, to care, to emphathize, to make the safety and well-being of our fellow humans not only a priority, but to elevate it into a truth that we hold to be self-evident. Yes, a minuet by Christian Cannabich lacks the bite, fire, and glamor of a Beethoven scherzo, just as the studiedly polite proceedings of a civil court case lack the bite, fire and glamor of an accused heretic howling in agony as he is being disembowled before merrymakers in a public square. But both the minuet and the court case stem from the same underlying impulse, which is to tame and temper our inner devils, cultivate our better angels, and create a culture for ourselves in which we can live lives that are other than brutal, painful, and short.

I don’t know what came over me. Weekender’s ennui, perhaps. Deer-in-the-headlights syndrome. Atrophy of the critical organs. I don’t know. But for whatever reason I did something bad. I watched a movie on television.

I watched a movie on television. I watched it all the way through, umpty-million commercials and all. I’m ashamed.

But not all that ashamed. In for a penny, in for a pound. I didn’t watch a movie that qualified as even remotely elevated or sophisticated. Nope. I headed straight for the gutter. My movie was a big-budget special-effects blockbuster that lacked even a fleeting hint of taste or brains. Mindless drivel, dreck dressed up in thick layers of CGI, doo-doo festooned with high-profile Hollywood names. Volcanoes. Tidal waves. Continental plates sliding into the sea. Destruction and mayhem and chaos galore. Lots of stuff going crash and boom and blammie. I suppose it could be viewed as a wry commentary on the futility of human endeavor in the face of nature’s callous indifference. Well, maybe to a prattling pre-teen with a brain full of pimples. Maybe to a moronic mall bimbo who would require sedation should her cell phone go on the fritz. Maybe to a retard whose idea of high culture is popcorn with real butter instead of imitation. Maybe to a gaping redneck slacker whose hero is Bart Simpson.

But for anybody else, it’s the pits, plain and simple. Stupid isn’t the half of it. Stupid is the whole of it. Slicked up and dumbed down, it assumes that I have the IQ of a Hostess Ding-Dong. I can’t remember the last time my dignity and intelligence were so egregiously disregarded. No, wait: I take that back. I do remember the last time my dignity and intelligence were so egregiously disregarded. It was the last time I watched a movie on television.

However, this time around I was intrigued by the movie’s unyielding and Puritanical code of behavior. You sin, you die: simple as that. Justice is meted out with the dynamite accuracy of YAHWEH in the Judaic tribal epics. In catastrophe movies, your lifespan is directly proportional to your onscreen morals.

I started estimating when one particular character was going to buy the farm, based on that character’s ethics or lack of same. It took no great insight to recognize that the obnoxious Russian tycoon would be toast and that his end would be appropriately gruesome. Nor did it take much skill to pick up that his slutty girlfriend was putting out for his studly airplane pilot. The only question was: which one would go first? In this case the pilot got putty-knifed down the side of a mountain while Slutskina got herself a brief reprieve thanks to a fleeting display of compassion for a frou-frou dog and the heroine’s children. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough. She was a slut. Ergo, she drowned, slowly enough to make sure that all the gum-snapping pinheads gaping at the multiplex screen got the message: floozies beware: you fornicate, you die.

Of particular interest was the flawed-but-basically-decent fellow who had the misfortune to be the other guy in the heroine’s life. It wasn’t his fault that she was separated from the movie’s lead actor and that probably even the bacteria in the men’s room knew that a reconciliation was inevitable. That is, once said lead actor shed some of his Peter Pan-ish ways and Learned To Love The Children More Than Himself and Stopped Retreating Into His Own World and Grew A Pair By Saving Everybody From Destruction. You know the guy I mean. He’s the one who is played by Sam Neill and Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise and Jeff Goldblum.

But that poor other guy. What a sap. Athough why he, or the lead actor, would find the wife desirable is beyond me. Even by catastrophe movie standards she was a total stick. But no matter. She was wanted by two men of approximately the same age, hairstyle, and skeletal type. Except that one was being paid a lot more to be in the movie than the other. Alternate hubby had his uses for a while, but he would have been a seriously loose end afterwards. So ‘twas curtains for him, although he got to wait until almost the last possible second. He wasn’t so much ethically challenged as he was merely a second banana. And in a disaster movie, second banana is poisoned fruit, indeed.

Thus, the rules for characters who wish to survive a catastrophe movie:

1. Always try to be the highest-paid actor’s kid. It’s like a ticket to immortality.

2. Don’t be a slut or a greedy sonofabitch. YAHWEH will smite you. Count on it.

3. Don’t be a mystic. You’ll be the first to go.

4. Don’t be a noble type, either, unless you’re really keen on getting the scene with the soft string accompaniment and vaseline on the camera lens while you croak out a loving goodbye.

5. Under no circumstances be in marital or amorous competition with the lead actor. Death awaits.

6. Oddly enough, being an obnoxious and self-serving politician would seem to be a pretty good life insurance policy.

7. If you’re not human, be a kid’s pet. Trust me. They will not kill you. They won’t even let your fur get wet.

But the best survival technique applies to all of us, and not just the lifeless cardboard cutouts up there on the screen. That technique is: don’t give those ratty filmmakers one dime of your money. They’ll go broke, tra-la, and that will be the end of that.

Audio pundits have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions. Seeing that digital downloads have increased by X percent, and sales of physical CDs have decreased by Y percent, some commentators have concluded that the compact disc will go out of production sometime around right now.

That’s silly. Compact discs aren’t going away any time soon. Numerous factors contribute to their continuing relevance in the marketplace. Digital downloads join physical media as yet another outlet for recordings; nothing has to replace anything else. Recorded sound is all around us and in many different formats: broadcast radio, satellite radio, Internet radio, YouTube, streaming services, downloads, CDs, LPs, tapes, even 7-inch 45 RPM singles and musty old 78 RPM shellacs.

CDs are likely to resist their own termination for quite a while. There are plenty of reasons for them to hang around, not only for their advantages, but also due to certain disadvantages in downloads that have yet to be fully addressed and eradicated. Let’s attend to downloaded audio’s shortcomings first.

Compromised Audio. That so many digital downloads are sonically compromised in the interest of faster download speeds is a serious objection for downloads to achieve parity with physical media. Uncompressed, full-quality downloads are available from an increasing number of vendors, but the two dominant players in retail downloads (Amazon and Apple) continue to trade file sizes for sound quality. It’s true that many listeners don’t really care about that, just as in previous eras listeners didn’t really care about the lousy sound on their transistor radios or el-cheapo record players. Nevertheless, a sizeable chunk of the market does care about sound quality.

Download Speeds. Even on a reasonably fast Internet connection, downloading an album in high-quality audio takes more time than it should. That’s why uncompressed audio remains out of reach for most folks; it’s just too dang inconvenient. High-res downloads, such as are available from outfits such as HDTracks or Linn Records, require more download time yet.

Discomfort and Unfamiliarity. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with using a computer (or media server) for audio playback. Even an iPod is terra incognita for many folks. CDs are simple and proven. You take them out of their case and put them in your player. Techie types such as myself may have the whole in-home network thing worked out, but we’re in the minority.

Tagging and Cataloging. Another overlooked hassle with digital downloads is the necessity of keeping proper track of them. Certainly audio tagging has gotten a lot better over the past few years. Nonetheless, it’s a rare download that I don’t need to re-tag.

Protection. It’s critical to take care of a digital audio library. Hard drives can crash. Hard drives will crash. Stuff can get lost. So backups are an absolute must. Not all that big of a deal, you might think—but just as a lot of folks are uncomfortable with using a computer as a media server, so are they unfamiliar with backing up their computer data. Set-it-and-forget devices such as Apple’s Time Capsule are a wonderful step forward, but they’re still restricted to an itty-bitty corner of the computer-using world.

Now onto the advantages of physical media.

Bulk purchases. I recently purchased the complete Arthur Rubinstein collection—all of the beloved pianist's recordings in one gigantic box set. I don’t even want to think of how long it would have taken to download that sucker. But more to the point, I love the big box with its high-gloss bound book, the reproductions of the original jacket art for each CD, and the general sense of happy exploration that comes from opening the box and pawing around inside. Ditto other recent collections, such as the Heifetz complete set, or the monster box of Toscanini’s stuff that is due to arrive fairly soon.

Insurance. Change is the norm in the computer world, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that a file format that is standard this year will also be standard five years from now. (WordPerfect, VisiCalc, and DBase files were ubiquitous and universal not all that long ago, remember.) Even if such popular digital audio formats as AIFF or FLAC or Apple Lossless hang around for a good long while, newer formats might come along that offer superior performance to today’s standards. Or a virus could wipe out your collection. Anything could happen. You might have to re-rip your entire CD collection someday. In fact, I did that just a year ago, to clean up a lot of older stuff that I had saddled with inferior file formats. That’s why I have stubbornly kept all of my physical CDs, even though I have them all ripped to my server in lossless formats.

Convenience. One of the reasons for the compact disc’s success is simplicity. You put it in the player and push Play. That’s it. No needles and discs to clean, no record to cue, no tape to rewind or fast-forward. Just a button on the remote. That ease of use remains unchanged. Not everybody can figure out how to navigate iTunes or a custom media server’s front end. But everybody knows how to use a CD player.

Pretty Stuff. CDs offer cases with pictures, and booklets with liner notes, artwork and translations. To be sure, those were a lot better back in the LP days. But the micro-printing on a CD booklet is better than nothing, and sadly, that’s typically what you get with a download. Even if the download does include the booklet, you need a computer or tablet to read it.

Secondhand Magic. Digital downloads exist in a timeless realm; present, past, future do not really exist for them. But a CD is a physical thing that was manufactured at one particular point in time. It just might go out of print. In fact, a lot of CDs go out of print, just the way almost LPs have, and all 78s have. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing of worth on those discs—in fact, there might be a lot of magic sitting on that forlorn little reject there in the bin at Amoeba Records. Until the day comes in which every single recording has been made available in uncompromised digital audio—and that’s a very, very long way off—used CDs, just like used LPs and their ilk, will remain compelling.

No Legalistic Shenanigans. CDs do not come with any kinds of restrictions as to digital rights. Some downloads do. All DVDs do—they’re pestered with that horrid region-coding stuff. Ditto Blu-Ray. Even though the Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) format offers higher quality audio than Redbook CDs, SACD is crippled by anti-copying restrictions. But a CD is universally playable, just as were its predecessors, the LP and the 78 RPM disc.

In short, CDs aren’t going to vanish any time soon. Whereas Naxos, EMI, and Universal Music offer uncompromised downloads, Sony Classical restricts downloads to iTunes and Amazon, in sonically compromised audio. I suppose they’ll come around sooner or later. Nonetheless, although I certainly take advantage of full-resolution downloads, the bulk of my audio purchases remain physical media, as they always have.

In the light of the picture-perfect springtime weather today in San Francisco, I could think of no better way to observe Record Store Day than by going for a goodly stroll that just happened to terminate at one of the City’s few remaining record stores.

As it happens, my neighborhood (Upper Market/Castro) is blessed with several dandy record stores. Streetlight Records on Market near Noe is a Castro district stalwart, and a store I visit often. Record stores won’t stay open if we don’t buy any records from them, remember. A bit farther down Market, at the infamous intersection at Octavia where unwary pedestrians have been sent off to their maker at the hands (and hood ornaments, grills, bumpers, and headlights) of impatient drivers attempting an illegal right turn onto the freeway entrance, there stands a sweet and sometimes overlooked record store called Grooves. Charming and quirky, the perfect oasis in the midst of the Market & Octavia desert, Grooves has the vibe of a used book store but instead stuffs itself with LPs, seasoned with a sprinkling of 45s and open-reel tapes. No CDs here.

Grooves doesn’t assault you with stomach-churning volume when you enter, just a nice record playing at human volume levels. Its mood is quiet and unruffled, in fine contrast to the gritty urban blare of a certain large record store out at the end of Haight. The gazillions of LPs are on the whole clearly organized. Nobody bothers you. You’re free to paw around to your heart’s content and find that elusive something that’s just the ticket for your mood of the moment.

As befits a store catering to collectors, the classical section at Grooves sports dedicated bins for RCA Victor Living Stereo, Mercury Living Presence, Westminster, and London blue-backs. Some of those puppies can be expensive rarieties indeed. Mostly it’s just nice to have them all in one place.

There’s a lot more to LP collecting than mere nostalgia. The current resurgence of interest in all things 33 1/3 rpm is partly fueled by trendy hipsters, to be sure. But I’m far from being a trendy hipster and yet here I am joining in the fun. Vinyl LPs have their special charms and their valuable place in the scheme of things. For one thing, any number of recordings haven’t made it out of their original formats and thus remain locked in their own time and place. That’s especially true of second-string performers. The big name ensembles have typically been remastered and re-released with dependable regularity over the years. As long as there’s still money to be made out of Toscanini’s recordings, Sony Classical will keep producing remastered editions of his umpty-million RCA and EMI discs. But that isn’t necessarily the case with, say, Anatole Fistoulari—a perfectly fine conductor and excellent musician whose sizeable recorded output has mostly gone missing in today’s digital world.

I was reminded of that absence just last night as I listened to an MGM Records album of Fistoulari and the London Symphony in Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite from Ivan the Terrible. MGM’s sojourn in the classical record biz was short, but from about 1953 to 1955 they produced a bevy of responsibly recorded and well-produced albums. A slight sub-bass rumble during one section of the Rimsky-Korsakov reveals that this album was made in London’s drafty old Kingsway Hall, one of the finest recording venues in the world despite being a horrid dump of a building that was plagued by noise from a subway line running underneath. But there it was: the London Symphony in Kingsway Hall, recorded by an A-list (or at least B+) conductor. It could easily have been a Decca record, re-released in a stellar digital remastering, as has been the case with countless other LSO/Deccas made in Kingsway. But it was on MGM, a label mostly concerned with releasing sountrack albums of the studio’s movies, later something of a force in pop music, but almost completely forgotten as a classical label. Thus the Fistoulari/LSO recordings have gone into limbo. You hear them on LP, or you don’t hear them.

Vanished titles aren’t the whole picture, however. Plenty of older recordings have made it firmly into the modern era in convenient, click- and pop-free digital remasterings. In most cases the remasterings present the original recording with all due fidelity. Some, alas, are far less responsible. Pierre Monteux’s recordings in San Francisco, for example. From 1941 through 1947 the orchestra recorded via a dedicated phone line running from San Francisco’s Opera House down to RCA’s studios in Los Angeles. It worked well enough but mandated a sharp cutoff in the upper frequency ranges, and no amount of jiggering is going to put treble into a recording where no treble exists. That hasn’t stopped some of the modern engineers from trying, nonetheless, with shrillness and stridency resulting.

Even if fine modern remasterings are easily available, there’s a lot to be said for having an original anyway. Just the larger album size, with liner notes in readable font sizes, is a good reason to indulge in an LP. Sometimes those recordings just sound better in their original incarnations. I find the treble blare on Mercury Living Presence recordings to be slightly offputting in modern digital remasterings, but on an original LP it doesn’t seem as noticeable.

At any rate, there’s all the reason in the world for LPs to stick around. Unless they’ve been terribly abused or overused, most LPs are ready to sing again with nothing more than a good cleaning to remove decades of accumulated dust, goo, and grease. They’re not really all that much bother to store; for one thing they’re skinnier than CDs even if they’re overall bigger, and from time to time they might turn out to be surprisingly good investments.

I celebrate Record Store Day as I sit here listening to Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony play the Brahms 2nd Symphony on a Mercury Living Presence LP just acquired this afternoon, only a few clicks and pops here and there. I’ve got a bag more of records to explore; stuff by Milstein, an intriguing Munch/Boston affair, a Kubelik, even a Kirsten Flagstad singing Sibelius songs. A nice afternoon in a sweet record store, now home with the goodies. What’s not to like about it all?

It was an accident. I didn't mean to, really I didn't. As the evidence of my transgression was made manifest, my parents were puzzled and concerned, yet gentle. They were on my side and I knew they were, but I was stubborn. I was determined to face the consequences on my own, all their solicitious advice notwithstanding.

Send it back, they said.

No, I said.

My dad looked at me steadily. Well, it's your money, he murmured. My mother gave him that look, the one that meant "So…is that ALL you're going to do about this??" He gave her that look, the one that meant "Yes, that's all I'm going to do, and don't you dare escalate."

They had their say, and I had mine.

Every month our mailbox would sprout a catalog from the Columbia Record Club. Bewitching and tempting, it was downright pornographic with its wanton promises of vinyl goodies galore. I usually lusted for everything in the Classical section. But my allowance limited me to one record per month, if that. Pure agony, those choices. Usually I settled on something I was absolutely certain would rock my boat big time—Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Debussy, Shostakovich, all those big splashy orchestral jobs. That is, provided I was solvent. Just as often I sighed in resignation as I checked the box saying "no selection this month" then dropped the postage-paid card in the mail.

I forgot to fill out my card one month. In the Columbia Record Club, "no answer" meant "send me this month's featured Classical album." So they sent me this month's featured Classical album. Given that I was flat broke, the arrival of that white media-mail cardboard box with the Columbia logo on the front was disconcerting. As I said, it was an accident. I opened it anyway. Columbia Stereo MS 6897, George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 in D Minor. The album cover is striking. A jet-black background surrounds a Gothic arch cutout that frames Ernst Ferdinand Oehme's Cathedral in Winter, one of the talismanic images of German Romanticism. The print is stark white, the Columbia logo and catalog number muted gold. I thought it was gorgeous. I still do.

Without a doubt my parents had my best interests at heart; they didn't know anything about Bruckner, but they knew that I wasn't the slightest bit interested in religious stuff, and that jacket implied one seriously churchy record. That's why they advised sending it back for a refund; they figured I'd hate it. But they underestimated the sheer magnetic power that a record—any record—had on their teenage son. At some subterranean atavistic level of consciousness I was starving for music. That's why I headed straight for the lush Romantic showstoppers; like a ravenous bear just emerging from hibernation, I needed the calories.

A grudging low-interest parental advance on my earnings as a grocery-store bag boy took care of my temporary cash-flow problem. MS 6897 was mine. I retreated with my prize down to the panelled basement room that served both as bedroom and cloistered retreat. With some trepidation I gently split open the cellophane wrapper and eased out the gray-label Columbia "360 Stereo" disc from within. I opened the smoked-glass plastic cover of my RCA Victor record player. I gave MS 6897 a gentle swipe or two with the record-cleaning brush. The moment of truth had arrived.

You understand that I had never heard of Anton Bruckner. I had never heard a note of his music. I didn't have the faintest idea what to expect. As the opening pulsating string figures emerged from my el-cheapo red-fabric-grill speakers—D minor chords lightly spiced by inner-voice ninths (i.e., e-naturals)—and the solo trumpet outlined a nobly simple falling figure D-A-A-D, I was mesmerized. A long crescendo carried me to the shattering peak when the inner-voice ninth emerged triumphant in the first violins, the whole eventually settling down to the first appearance of major mode and a well-earned moment of tranquillity. I remembering lying flat on my back in front of the stereo, my eyes shut, as I drank in the symphony from beginning to end, stopping only long to flip the record over between the 2nd and 3rd movements. When the symphony ended, I played the Scherzo again. Then again. Howling erupted from above to turn down the goddamn stereo goddamnit. More Scherzo. More first movement. More howling to come get your goddamn dinner or I'm going to stuff it down the goddamn garbage disposal and you can goddamn well go hungry and GODDAMNIT TURN OFF THAT GODDAMN RECORD FOR NOW GODDAMNIT.

I learned a bit about Bruckner. Jack Diether's essay-length liner note clued me in to the gentle Austrian from an impoverished hamlet near Linz who eventually travelled to Vienna, endured the mockery of the Big Apfel's sneering sophisticates, and was eventually recognized as the giant that he was. We no longer had an encyclopedia—it had gone missing at some point during our unsettled existence—so for the time being that was the sum total of my Bruckner education. Come to think of it, I didn't move on with him for many years to come. But no matter. The seeds had been sown.

I can even pinpoint my next Bruckner experience: It was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sergiu Comissiona. They were playing the 8th. I'll be honest and admit that I was bored during the first two movements. But the Adagio rekindled the old flame, and from then on Bruckner and I have never been far apart. Given the hefty time investment mandated by an entire Bruckner symphony, more often than not my Bruckner sessions are piecemeal, a movement here and a movement there. Until recently entire symphonies yet remained terra incognita. This past season a pre-concert lecture on the Fifth for the SF Symphony filled one particularly gaping hole as I put myself through a month-long crash course in that most majestic (and lengthy) of symphonies. Assignments for program notes on symphonies 2 and 6 have encouraged me to get my Brucknerian house in order, and a most pleasant housekeeping it has been.

My MS 6897 disappeared at some point, probably during the late 1980s when I began foolishly divesting myself of LPs in favor of CDs. But today I went on an Amoeba Records run and there it was—a pristine, nearly-new copy. I haven't listened to it yet. But of course I will. And I think I'll listen prone on the living room floor, in honor of my teenaged self who gambled his allowance on serendipity and won.