I’m always on the lookout for mentions of the music in unexpected places. I was paging through a copy of Michael Medved’s Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life at my local bookstore — purely out of morbid curiosity, mind you — when I came across a semi-striking fact: while the film critic-turned-moral philosopher was attending Palisades High School, in LA, he and other students collaborated with Roy Harris on a musical pageant titled Liberty? I can find no such work in the Harris worklist in The New Grove, but Medved assures us he wrote the libretto for it. In a commendable spirit of self-criticism, which he is welcome to extend to his more recent work, he calls his text “insufferable, incoherent adolescent whining.” He is not, incidentally, the only televised film critic to play a cameo role in the career of a major American composer. Harry Partch scholars know Roger Ebert as the author of a discerning review of Partch’s microtonal musical Water! Water! Ebert was the student critic for the Daily Illini at the time. Ebert, by the way, is one of my favorite critics working in any medium. When I was first starting out, I used his collected reviews as a model. That’s neither here nor there. This entire post is neither here nor there. That’s what blogs are for!
