I’ve been accused by some of being a musicologist, but I bristle at the appellation as I have little or no formal training in that arena. Rather, I view myself as an interested and (somewhat) informed music lover with tastes that range from the Baroque to the 20th century.

As regular readers of this illustrious journal know, I am most interested in what I have frequently referred to in these pages as the “darker recesses of Western music.” Am I more interested in listening to Fasch than to Bach, or to Salieri than to Mozart? At times, but then there are also moments when I crave the music of the Leipzig Thomaskantor or the Wunderkind from Salzburg. Then there’s my passion for British music and also what the Brits term “Light Music,” music that falls somewhere between Classical and pop. I someday hope to have enough light music to follow in the footsteps of my distinguished English colleague, Brian Kay, who for many years hosted a light music program on the BBC’s Radio 3.

But I digress. My inclination to stray from the oft-trod path goes back to the mid-1960s and my brief and undistinguished tenure as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama. I came under the spell of a musicologist who challenged us to look beyond the obvious. It has been so many years that I can’t remember his exact words, but they were something akin to, “Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees, and there are wonderful things hiding in that forest!” I carried these words with me when I exchanged my matched Buffet clarinets for the microphone almost 40 years ago. At the time, there was a dearth of recordings of just about anything outside of the basic repertoire. I distinctly remember encountering an old Decca Gold Label recording of orchestral music by Bach’s Bohemian contemporary, Jan Dismas Zelenka, in a cutout bin. It grabbed my curiosity, so I snapped it up for a song, took it home, and dropped the needle. I thought, “This is terrific! Where has it been all these years?”

Ever since, I’ve pursued the underappreciated, the neglected, and the unknown, championing their cause for any and all who would listen. In addition to having worked as program director or music director for NPR affiliates in my native Alabama, as well as in Michigan and Kentucky, my near four decades in broadcasting have included memorable and extended tenures with now-defunct WFLN (Philadelphia) and WQXR (New York). After writing for American Record Guide for a decade, I joined the staff of Fanfare in the fall of 2000. While my own library isn’t that extensive (some 2500 CDs that contain over 10,300 compositions), it is quite varied, including many world premiere recordings. I periodically turn over some of the material, eventually regretting that I let one thing or another slip through my fingers!

I am now in my second marriage (I got it right this time), not to mention the sixth decade of my life. In spite of encroaching old age and its associated infirmities, I have no intention of slowing down. A colleague of mine recently inquired, “When are you going to retire?” “Retire?” I replied. “Never! I’m having far too much fun!”