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Rockwell Matters

April 28, 2008

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In Germany, newspaper Feuilletons, or arts sections, have the nice custom of devoting thoughtful essays to major artists on their milestone birthdays. In this country, apart maybe for when someone like Elliott Carter turns 100, we wait for bad news, like death.
 
Obituaries, though constrained by the politeness expected in such a format, can offer a reasoned overview of a career. A. O. (or “Tony”) Scott in the New York Times had a nice piece about Roger Ebert recently, though it was shadowed by Ebert’s illness. Appreciative comments about critics who have been fired is a related genre, unfortunately more and more common these days. Bob Christgau, the properly self-styled “dean of American rock critics,” was able to enjoy all the pleasure one might derive from reading one’s own obits, what with the outpouring of admiration and indignation that accompanied his firing from the Village Voice. More recently, it was Deborah Jowitt, though she will apparently continue to contribute dance reviews to the Voice.
 
Now it’s the turn of Alan Rich, canned from the LA Weekly, which is owned by, yes, Village Voice Media, a particularly heavy-handed libertarian conglomerate. I’ve been reading Rich for more than 40 years; he’s 83 now, though you would never guess it from his prose. We shared a Harvard and Berkeley background and stints at the flagship Pacifica radio station KPFA, but he was older and we didn’t then know each other. In the 60’s he was in New York and I was in Berkeley, and he was one of my main sources of information about innovative new music. I first heard about Philip Glass from reading Rich.
 
Since then he moved from the New York Herald Tribune to New York Magazine to New West and California magazines to the Weekly. He is still full of lively interest in new music, and still full of sometimes quirky prejudices about old music. By now he has added a winning local partisanship about the music of California, south and north. He has always been, even at his feistiest, a joy to read.
 
Still on the west coast, an appreciation triggered by an actual obituary. The conductor and composer Gerhard Samuel died recently in Seattle. Curiously, he was also 83. Samuel’s stern personality and passion for new music were the main reasons he never made a major career. But he will be remembered with the utmost fondness by those of us who were thrilled by his Oakland Symphony concerts in the 1960’s, in which he took a community orchestra and made great music, and by audiences at the San Francisco Ballet and the Cabrillo Music Festival, and by his students over his two decades at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. I wish he could have made a grander international mark. But international success is not the only measure of musical worth, and Gerhard Samuel was a most worthy musician.
 
— John Rockwell
 
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