Summary: If I were a rich man, yabba-dabba-dabba yabba-dabba-dabba-daba-doo…<br> Now look, I will be the first to acknowledge how lucky I am: in a world filled with want and poverty, my family and I live in the greatest of comfort.<br> (The old joke must be told. The flight attendant settles an elderly gentleman into his seat and asks, “are you comfortable?” He replies with a shrug, “I make a living.”) <br> My domestic comfort notwithstanding, my wife and I work very hard, and as neither of us has a pension beyond our self-employment IRAs, and as we have relatively young children (7 and 11 years old) who (or so I’m told) need to be fed, clothed, and educated, we worry about money. Yes, we are aware that “money can’t buy you love.” But it can buy you just about everything else, including freedom from worry, and that – in a nutshell – is 50% of my definition of what it is to be monetarily rich: never having to worry about money. The other 50% of my definition of what it is to be rich is to have so much money that it becomes imperative to give it away.<br> I am about to cross into the realm of fantasy, and if there’s anyone out there who would like to turn that fantasy into reality, be my guest. Because when it came to giving money away, I’d be a great rich person. I know we would all have our causes; here’s what I would do.<br> I’d set up a foundation dedicated to the creation, performance, publication and recording of new music by established but under-exposed American composers, meaning the vast majority of living American composers. (Why just Americans is another conversation, though for now let’s just observe that funding new music is not presently a high national priority in the United States.) Why do we need such a foundation dedicated to such a cause? It’s personal. As an established but under-exposed composer myself, I will gladly admit to being just a bit cranky about all the funding provided for “emerging composers”, and even more irritated about the tiny proportion of living composers whose works are performed and recorded by nationally visible organizations. This is a classic “don’t get me started” topic, and I’m not going to name names, but now that I am started, here you go. You have no idea how many truly wonderful composers there are out there who never ever get a high-visibility performance and/or recording, while the same dozen-or-two composers get the vast majority of the prizes, commissions, performances, and recordings. The issue is most assuredly not one of quality or ability – I would tell you that my friends Frank LaRocca and Marty Rokeach, for example – are as good if not better than the composers presently winning the Grawemeyers, the Pulitzers and getting commissions from the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. Talent is not the issue; as is so often the case in our lives, luck, connections, luck, location, luck, timing, and luck have more to do with it than anything else.<br> So. My rich-person philanthropic fantasy is to increase the size of the “luck pool” by finding and commissioning worthy American composers. Once composed, my foundation would then see to the performance, publication, recording and promotion of those commissioned works to the community at large. In doing all of this, I would have two models in mind: the composer and pianist Henry Cowell and the virtuoso double-bassist, composer and conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Cowell was a remarkable man and artist; sooner or later I’ll have the opportunity to feature him in a blog. But for the remainder of today’s post we turn to Serge Koussevitzky, who was born on July 26, 1874 in Vyshny Volochek, in Russia, and died 67 years ago today, on June 6, 1951, in Boston.<br> There was never much doubt about what Koussevitzky was going to “do” when he grew up; he was born into a Jewish family of musicians and groomed from the beginning for the profession. Along with the bass, he studied the violin, cello,
