work anniversary

Today marks 20 years since my first professional concert review was published - in phosphors, on the San Francisco Classical Voice website.

I'd been reading SFCV for some time already, and I had noted a news item there about Symphony Silicon Valley (since redubbed Symphony San Jose) moving to a new venue, the California Theatre in downtown San Jose. This was a 1927 film and stage theater that had fallen on hard times and had been renovated, and the premiere concert was going to be a vintage celebration.

I was going to be attending, and as I'd always been particularly interested in reviews of concerts I'd attended myself (to match my opinions against the reviewer's), I was looking forward to reading what they'd have to say. But when that week's batch of reviews came out, SSV wasn't in it.

So I wrote them and asked if they wanted a review. I had one already: I'd written one for LJ, having acquired the habit of reviewing all the concerts I attended. I rewrote it and beefed it up, and sent it in, and they published it. (I had to scarf this from the Wayback Machine because SFCV did not get its archiving system organized until several years later.)

And they paid me for it. And then they phoned me up a couple weeks later and asked if I could cover this string quartet concert that was coming up. And that's how I became a professional concert reviewer.

Of course, having been listening to classical music closely for over 30 years already at that point is part of what gave me the confidence to do this, as did the frequent experience of reading something noted in a review and thinking, yeah, I noticed that too. That convinced me I had the ears for the job. And I've been doing it ever since. Here's my most recent effort; I'm sure I've improved in judgment and authority, but there's a spontaneous lightness to my early reviews that I haven't always maintained.