By Sasha Anawalt, Director, USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs
On Missing Alan Rich (1924-2010)
There is going to be a great, big hollowness in the concert hall. Walt Disney Concert Hall, REDCAT, the church where Jacaranda plays in Santa Monica, wherever E.A.R. unit is, in short, wherever music is in Los Angeles. It’s going to be harder to listen without Alan Rich, because when he was there – and he was always there – I partially listened through him. He and Mark Swed helped many in L.A. fall in love with listening. Alan’s writing is what done it. A colleague of mine at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and at the LA Weekly, he wrote fast; that’s because he loved writing as much as he loved listening, which I have to say I envied. “However often my ears are blessed by Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, I am stirred every time by new things discovered and an uncontrollable urge to write about them,” he wrote. Alan reveled in discovering new things, including new things in old things. He was never too old for any new thing. And, you know, one of the things I will miss most about him is how he would always treat me like a sweet, new young thing and ask me to sit on his lap.
I’ll miss the flirtation. And the reading. And him.
