I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to. We were supposed to have met last October, but insurmountable obstacles on my end prevented this from happening. “I’d be glad to have you sit in on one of my classes [at Mannes] whenever you’re able to,” he said to me over the phone shortly before concluding an interview with him about a musical mentor from his youth. That was just over six weeks ago.
At the age of 12 I was bit by the classical music bug and life has never been the same since. Through a series of chance happenstances, I quickly ended up diving into the proverbial deep end: Specifically mid-20th century avant-garde music and historical recordings. Both of these youthful loves were combined in my discovery of Ignaz Friedman, by way of the Pearl Records set which Allan Evans produced and wrote his splendid liner notes for. Hitherto my only encounter with Chopin’s Mazurkas had been through Arthur Rubinstein’s late RCA recordings, which presented this music as desiccated relics caked beneath a thick layer of formaldehyde. (It was not until about 20 years later that I finally began to love Rubinstein’s Chopin—except for his Mazurkas.) Hearing Friedman’s fingers, however, was something else altogether. Chopin’s bristling rhythms and harmonies (in the late Mazurkas sometimes closer to Schoenberg’s Vienna than the Paris salons of his own time) came alive. Suddenly one wasn’t hearing a neatly curated museum curio kept tidily under glass. Friedman understood the performance of Chopin not as the reenactment of esoteric rituals encoded in a ceremonial dead language, but as documents of joys and sorrows uttered in a living lingua franca. Here was Chopin the lover, the poet, the dreamer, the frustrated patriot whose music drew a starlit patina over subversive nationalist yearnings of a future Poland resurgent. Heady stuff for an 8th grader!
Somehow I managed to collect my thoughts and scribble out a fan letter to Allan Evans, which was sent in care of Pearl Records, who then happily forwarded it to my hero. What I wrote has since vanished into the recesses of my memory, but Allan Evans kindly replied to me, patiently answering a number of questions, and encouraging me further on my adventures in listening.
A co-worker at a record store gig long ago once chided me for my musical preferences. “If you listen to classical music now, what are you going to listen to when you’re old?,” he snickered. Presumably he had never heard Rachmaninoff’s sweetly rueful observation: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” (And that in a time well before today’s present atomization of music and the listening audience.) Yet it was precisely because of classical music that I needed to hear and absorb other styles in order to better contextualize it. Over the next quarter of a century I used my ears, to borrow a phrase from Charles Ives, like a man. Coursing through my cochleas like an unstoppable torrent were tangos, milongas, Weimar-era cabaret songs, psych-folk rock from the 1960s, easy-listening instrumentals for bluehairs long gone, experimental noise from East Asia, mournful prewar Japanese gunka, electronic novelty amusements, languorous romantic ballads from a Latin America now the dust of eternity—alongside Shostakovich, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Feldman, Webern, Brahms, Beethoven, Revueltas, and Carter. Although he was unaware, Allan Evans presided over it all, my distant spiritus rector.
A few years ago at another record store job, a co-worker inducted me into the mysteries of blues music. As my head swirled with the frisson of hearing this music for the first time, my thoughts turned to musicians from another, seemingly unrelated time and place. It struck me that there was a thread of kinship, however unlikely it appeared, between Rev. Gary Davis, Washington Phillips, and Blind Willie Johnson; and the likes of Ockeghem, Wolkenheim, and Josquin. One could call the latter representatives of “Western European roots music,” if you will. (With Bartók, arguably, being its final practitioner and synthesizer.) This epiphany, vividly illustrating the “only two kinds of music” quote apocryphally attributed to an ever-expanding who’s who of musical notables, was the kind of deep listening personal experience fostered by Allan Evans.
He was a gentleman scholar whose restless intellectual curiosity touched countless people, some even afar and unknown to him; an individual who is a rarity in any age, but especially so in our strident and vulgar times. We shall not see the likes of him again.
I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to.