6/3/2008

About Me
I am Alan Rich, writing about myself which is my second-favorite subject. Music is my first. I discovered writing about music, finding the words to translate the experience of hearing music and reacting to it, soon after I discovered music itself. A friend at college showed me Donald Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis which, in spite of that academic title, described music in wonderfully imaginative, lively language that still related to the sounds themselves.  I immediately decided that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. (A career in medicine, which was what I thought I had wanted to do, had become less interesting day by day, to my parents’ horror.)

I go to concerts and operas and try to share the experience of the people around me in the hall; that is still the best way to experience music. Second best is hearing music alone, at home or in the car or wherever. I can’t abide the steady musical diet, music as wallpaper. I know people who have to leave the radio on even when they leave the house; “it activates the atmosphere,” they explain, or some such. At 83, almost 84, I still keep some space free in my head to get excited by a new experience…even for something not necessarily all that new. Last week I heard a really beautiful performance of  Debussy’s “Sacred and Profane Dances” at a “Jacaranda” concert in Santa Monica, music I think I know pretty well, and it just blew me away. Maybe, if I had had that music, or something else from that period, running on my home Muzak all day the day before, I’d have missed the wonderful stinging harmony of that live performance.  

Anyway, here’s my blog, which is the same rambling prose (and cons) that I’ve been writing and sending out to a bunch of friends now for several years, which has also been my column in LA Weekly, and thus confined by word count. LA Weekly fired me about six weeks ago, a decision not by local management but by the owners in Phoenix of the merged chain of papers, who have other ideas about cultural  coverage. (Have you seen the Sex Blog in their Village Voice?)  Nothing has changed  as far as you people are concerned; we aren’t selling subscriptions or anything like that. You just have to register, and the reason for that – as I understand it, and I’m still a babe in the woods where cyberstuff is concerned – is to have a count of readers to wave in the faces of potential advertisers – the guys who put dancing cakes of soap out in the margins of your screen.  Sooner or later  soiveheard.com the blog will metamorphose into soiveheard.com the website (the date for that is Oct 17)