One summer, when I was a kid (maybe seven, or eight) I read Fred Gipson’s 1956 classic Old Yeller. I hadn’t seen the movie version. (Come to think of it, I never did see it.) When I got to the end, when Travis Coates has to shoot his beloved dog, I cried and cried....
“Musician, mentor, friend.” That was the headline of a story in the Nov. 14 edition of the Rochester, NY Democrat & Chronicle. The story continued: “Noted as a scholar and a gentleman . . . the late Alfred Mann is credited with bringing attention to early music....
In his magnum opus, the Dark Tower heptology, Stephen King writes a foreword to the last several volumes entitled simply, “On Being Nineteen,” and the number 19 shows up as an idée fixe throughout the series. I remember 19 very well: it is a potent threshold, a time...
(Thoughts on the eve of the Alfred Mann Music Festival) When I was nineteen, I was offered a position as composition instructor at a university. To my dad, a musicologist and college professor, this must have seemed a dream come true. What more wonderful career...
