five questions

sartorias posed me these

1. I'd like to read about everything you remember of your first encounter with Lord of the Rings. Did you stumble on it? Read it before or after The Hobbit? Age? What was your setting, and how did your feelings unfold from first to last?
Through reading The Hobbit. I was eleven. I'd borrowed a copy of The Hobbit - that's a story in itself which I'll omit here - and I was so enchanted that when I saw the note at the end that there was a 3-volume sequel, I did something I'd never done before: scooped up my own money, rode my bicycle down to a small bookstore a few miles away, and bought paperbacks of all four of them. This was October or November of sixth grade. I just carried each volume of Lord of the Rings around until I'd finished it, engrossed all the way. Except it wasn't quite that simple. Though I was engrossed, I was also impatient, and I peeked ahead at the appendices enough that by the time they got to Rivendell, I knew what was going to happen. I'd now say that at eleven I was just too young for something that mature. Consequently I never had a "proper" first reading of the book, and my emotional reactions to it at the time seem muted. Except that I loved the book and re-read it every year at the same time until I went to university, when I finally ran out of time.
Speaking not so much of the first reading but of my general impressions of it as a child, what I loved most was the historical appendices. I was fascinated by things like royal genealogies - I could still, off the top of my head, give you a complete account, with dates, of the succession of the English crown since 1066 - and Tolkien's fictional ones were just as engrossing, though I wasn't so naive as to think I would find it interesting if it wasn't backing up a cracking good story. The other feeling that dominated was frustration at not being able to find anyone else at school who'd read the book or was interested in it. When I stumbled across the Mythopoeic Society six years later - and when you're a kid, six years is a long time - I was so delighted at finally being in a room (Edith Crowe and Amy Wisniewski's living room, to be precise) full of people who'd all read The Lord of the Rings and wanted to talk about it that, in a sense, I've never left that room since.

2. One of the things I began to notice back when I was single and collecting Musical Heritage Society albums was what a sometimes profound difference a conductor made (as well as an orchestra, but I was used to contrasting still-learning school orchestras with pros). Prokokieff's "Classical Symphony," for example, turned into lugubrious treacle when slowed to a thumping tread. What conductor has consistently pleased you, or do you consider specific conductors better for specific composers?
To the last point, absolutely, and when I'm discussing specific composers with people, I can sometimes recommend conductors. I don't, however, internalize this the way I do composers. There are three types of classical record collectors: audiophiles, performer nerds, and repertoire nerds. I'm a repertoire nerd, and can more easily talk about the different symphonies by a composer than about different performances. In my early years I viewed musical works as platonic entities. I wanted one copy of each work on my list, and apart from preferring a variety of conductors for a set of pieces like symphonies, I didn't care whose it was. Gradually I realized, as you did, that it makes a difference, that each performance even of one piece is a separate work of art, and I tried to cultivate taste. Since I became a concert reviewer, I have to focus on performance, so I'm even more sensitive, but I'm buying a lot fewer recordings these days.
I'll give one example of a specific performer. The first time I bought a box set of a composer's symphonies because I wanted that particular performer in all of them was Bernard Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Bruckner. But that wasn't just for Haitink's interpretation - he was a great Brucknerian, but not the only one - but for the resonant sound of the Concertgebouw hall, resonance being vital to Bruckner. I've attended a concert in person at the Concertgebouw, and it was glorious.

3. Years ago, when I, in my ignorance, slammed all music composed after 1930, I think it was, saying that it all sounded like instruments being tossed down stairs, you gave me a list of modern music that I either appreciated, or outright liked. Hovaness (sp?) being one of those discoveries. Would that list be the same, or have you discovered new composers who belong in that list?
The time I brought CDs of some good 20C music over to your house, all those composers, including Hovhaness, later wound up on my list of The Greatest 20th Century Symphonists You've Never Heard Of. The other list I gave you was this one, which was limited to post-1970 works that weren't by canonical minimalists. (I've updated it just now for availability of recordings.) Some of these I can still remember where I first encountered them. Górecki's symphony became famous with the Zinman recording in 1992, but I'd known of it for some ten years already, since my friend DGK picked up a recording (on LP!) out of curiosity and insisted on playing it for me. It was our secret favorite before the world discovered it, the way that The Lord of the Rings was a few people's secret favorite until the world discovered that with the paperbacks in 1965. I wrote about it at length in an obituary for Górecki. Michael Nyman I found when I watched Peter Greenaway's enthralling Prospero's Books, one of several Greenaway films Nyman scored. I enjoyed the music so much I bought the soundtrack, and on inspection found a raucous minimalist composer I really liked. Michael Torke I picked up from casual curiosity in the record store, and found in Ash a piece unerringly reminiscent of Beethoven. Caroline Shaw came to my attention when she won the Pulitzer for the arrestingly spooky Partita, which I listened to online, and I've been catching anything else by her I can find in concert ever since. Paul Schoenfeld (whose plain descriptive titles hide klezmer riots of music), Arturo Márquez (champion of Mexican dance-hall music), Belinda Reynolds (surefooted postminimalism), and Osvaldo Golijov (utterly weird and hypnotic song cycle) are all composers I encountered in concerts, most of which I was reviewing, and found myself swept away by the music. That list was made only four years ago, so it doesn't take much updating. But I continue to find good composers that way, like Anna Clyne and Ola Gjeilo, and recently I've been chewing over the work of a couple of Icelandic women named Anna Þorvaldsdóttir and María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir.
I limited my list to post-1970 instead of the post-1950 of its model because I didn't want to fill it up with 1950s symphonies. Indeed, when I tried making a symphonies list I found about 20 post-1950 symphonies that could have made my top recent works list, as well as another 30 or more from the first half of the century, and that was limiting it to one per composer. So I think I'll save that whole project for another time.

4. Did you read Game of Thrones, and if so, what did you think of it?
I started to read the first book, and gave up early, finding it boring. This surprised me, as I'd previously been a big fan of GRRM's work, liking many of his early short stories and finding The Armageddon Rag, though crass and unsubtle, brilliant at both evocation and sub-creation. What I found boring about Game of Thrones was that it felt to me not like a fantasy, but like a historical novel with magic in it. I tend to find historical novels, even of periods I'm interested in, to be tedious: it's something about the style they're written in and the way they lay out their exposition, which is too often in an "As you know, Bob," manner.
I've never watched the tv series, which was on a channel I don't get.

5. You've got a token to the H. G. Wells patented time machine. Where do you go, and if you can take along any modern thing you can carry, what would it be?
That's so broad an offering I hardly know what to choose. But I did have this discussion once in regard specifically to historical concerts, and I was sure which one I'd most want to attend: Beethoven's enormous benefit concert in Vienna, Dec. 22, 1808, at which he premiered both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and a lot of less monumental music. I've read that the performances were probably terrible, but it's got more historical significance packed into it than perhaps any other single concert. As for what I'd bring along, an audio recorder, naturally.
I'd also like somebody - not me, because I'm no good with cameras or at sneaking in places - to quietly break in to Sibelius's house some time in the late 1930s and secretly photograph the score of his Eighth Symphony, the one he later destroyed unperformed.