As a trained musicologist, I draw for my work on Fanfare not only from my undergraduate studies at Yale and my graduate studies at Berkeley—working with and learning from scholars like Joseph Kerman, Daniel Heartz, Alan Curtis, Philip Brett, Richard Crocker, and Richard Taruskin—but also from over a decade of teaching music history and theory at institutions like Case Western, the University of Alberta, the Universität Salzburg, and, most recently, Bowling Green State University in northwest Ohio. Of course my approach as a reviewer arises organically from my education; but its roots actually go back to my childhood in a small town in coastal Massachusetts.

My first exposure to the idea that different recordings and performances mattered coincided with my first encounters with classical music in grade school. My mother introduced me to the joys of following opera recordings with a libretto through the Leinsdorf recording of Madame Butterfly with Leontyne Price and Richard Tucker. I was enthralled by music’s power to intensify the words on the page. Soon after, I discovered my sister’s subscription to the Time-Life centennial series of DG Beethoven recordings, so, armed with Karajan’s 1962 Beethoven cycle and the Beatles, I was ready to face the terrors of junior high.

My musical interests were taken in hand by my uncle, an organist and avid record collector. Fuelling my early interest in the music of Wagner and Mahler, he impressed upon me a basic approach to listening to music: hear and remember fresh details every time you listen to a recording, get to know a composer’s works in biographical sequence, and note how different recordings can show profoundly different things about the same music. Although he had his clear likes and dislikes, he invited me to argue with him and keep an open mind. When he died suddenly in 1978, I found myself the beneficiary of thousands of LPs, a vague responsibility to continue his work as a collector, and a deep passion to familiarize myself with as much repertoire as possible.

In high school and college I pursued composition, conducting, and saxophone, continuing the serious classical studies I had begun in high school with Kenneth Radnofsky through to being a participant in his Tanglewood seminar as a post-grad. I performed as a member of the New Haven Symphony, and remain the only saxophonist to win Yale’s undergraduate concerto competition. I also played jazz well enough to play in some all-state groups, and was a reliable pit-orchestra denizen of a vibrant pre-Broadway scene. In grad school, I performed with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and I still find myself conducting the occasional choir.

Although my PhD dissertation examined Mahler’s compositional influence on Schoenberg, my teaching, research, and reviewing interest embrace the gamut of music, including tonal music in the 20th century, Wagner, Russian music, occasional items of earlier music, and, especially, operetta. Spurred on by our fearless editor and a unit in the world-music course I teach, I have lately also developed an interest in Indian film music.