Today I've been listening raptly to WHRB's David Elliott Memorial Orgy, a tribute to Harvard radio's spiritus rector, who died last month at the age of seventy-eight. It was a melancholy joy to hear again David's mellifluous, unpretentious, effortlessly knowledgeable voice. Was there was ever a finer announcer of classical-music radio? I know of none. But he was a great deal more than that; he was an educator of rare ability, a mentor of unstinting generosity, one of the most selfless people I have ever met. In a segment aired toward the end of the program, I tried to convey my gratitude to and for David, without whom I would probably have never become a music critic. Here's the audio I sent to Allison Pao and Xilin Zhou, two Harvard undergraduates who managed the brilliant feat of putting together the program and sending it out remotely:
Many more memories came to mind as I listened to dozens of alumni, performers, listeners, and friends extol David. What he created at the station was an atmosphere of dedication, seriousness, and thoroughness, which applied not only to classical music, his primary interest, but also to folk, jazz, rock, and R&B. Each department had a particular identity, a sense of mission, and whether or not David liked the music in question — he blanched at the ruder eruptions of post-punk rock and hip-hop — he appreciated anyone with an assiduous streak. When, for example, my friend Jason Shure went to superhuman lengths to pay tribute to Captain Beefheart, he earned David's respect, if not his comprehension. Obsession was the rule during the winter and spring "Orgy" periods — orgies being multi-hour or in some cases multi-day explorations of a composer, artist, band, ensemble, genre, or period. Orgies are said to have begun when a student expressed relief at having finished his exams by playing all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row. Thanks primarily to David's influence, such stunt-like escapades became ambitious undertakings of research and explication. Shortly before I arrived at WHRB, the station aired a complete traversal of the works of J. S. Bach, with Prof. Christoph Wolff serving as scholarly adviser. Nothing quite like it had taken place anywhere; David and Michael Rosenberg, who produced the program, were able to make use of Hänssler Classics recordings of cantatas that had just been issued.
My somewhat maladjusted post-adolescent temperament was immediately drawn to these exercises in exhaustiveness. David recognized me at once as someone who would join him in his quest to uncover little-known composers, neglected performers, and obscure oddities of all kinds. Although he loved the core repertory as much as anyone, he refused to let WHRB become the sort of easy-listening classical station that would play snippets of Vivaldi and greatest hits of Mozart. Indeed, there was a list of "warhorses" that were more or less forbidden, although they were allowed to run rampant on a semi-annual Warhorse Orgy. I inherited from David a wide-open conception of the repertory, running from Alkan to Zelenka. There was never the one perfect recording. Whenever I fastened on to a favorite — say, Karajan's Mahler Ninth — he would say, "Have you heard Bruno Walter live from Vienna?" I might have stuck with my Karajan, for the time being, but the interplay of alternatives was all important. As historically informed performances of Baroque music came to the fore, he retained a charming fondness for the likes of Alfred Cortot's Brandenburgs, Malcolm Sargent's Messiah, and Klemperer's St. Matthew Passion. I have a distinct memory of him listening in awe when the Passion came on the air. As I was bustling on to some pressing task, he said, "Just listen!"
During my time at WHRB, I presented two weekly shows, the Twentieth-Century Symphony and Music Since 1900, and hosted a procession of orgies, including complete surveys of Britten, Shostakovich, Brahms, and Nielsen, as well as a multi-genre program called the Avant-Garde of the 70s and 80s, with sections on jazz and experimental rock curated by Mike Pahre and Mike Vazquez. David's vast record collection would fill in many missing gaps in these programs: only he could have supplied Shostakovich's Moscow, Cheremushki or Britten's Paul Bunyan (yet to be commercially recorded, but David had an off-the-air tape). The orgies would include historical-performance sections, for which David usually served as guest announcer. (We could not, of course, announce for 50 or 60 hours straight, though we'd stretch the limits of what was possible.) For my final WHRB project, Mahler and the Fin de Siècle, David contributed an impeccable segment on Mahler's Singers, playing rare discs of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Leopold Demuth, Selma Kurz, Leo Slezak, and Richard Mayr. I spent so many hours chatting with David, looking over Schwann record catalogues, browsing the Harvard Music Library catalogue, plotting how to obtain the seemingly unobtainable. It was in David's spirit that I ended up writing to György Ligeti in the hope of locating a recording of the Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes. Ligeti duly told me how to find one — a letter that I subsequently lost, to my eternal regret.
At times, this pursuit of the elusive became absurd. Not until WHRB's 75th-anniversary celebration in 2015 did I discover that David had recorded a delirious moment from my Nielsen Orgy of January 1990. He proceeded to play that tape to the anniversary gathering, sending me into a vertiginous state of pride and embarrassment blended. What happened was that I had listed in the program guide a recording of Nielsen's final finished work, the 30-second-long Piano Piece in C, Fog-Schousboe 159. It was supposed to appear on Hyperion's two-CD set of Nielsen piano music, with Mina Miller at the keyboard. But when I got out the discs I was bewildered to find that tiny piece was not there. I made this discovery just before the the final section of the program, which presented legendary symphonic performances by Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen. David, observing how crestfallen I was by the absence of FS 159, came up with a crazy plan: why not find the score at the Harvard Music Library and make an instant recording? I was no great shakes as a pianist, but the music was brief enough, and simple enough, for me to tackle. During Grøndahl's Second Symphony, I ran to the library to check out the score, and during Tuxen's Fifth I ventured with David to the Adams House Junior Common Room to make the recording. This is what ensued on air:
It's doubtful that anyone would have cared if the Piano Piece in C had failed to appear, but at that moment it mattered to me immensely. David took obvious delight when the students were seized by manias of this kind, which set WHRB apart from every other station. I thank him for having cultivated my obsessive drives, directed them, put them to constructive use. What he did for me is what all great teachers do. And, although he had no official role in the money-devouring monster that is Harvard University, he was one of the two best teachers I encountered there — one of the best teachers I ever had.
