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EAR #2 feb 1973 copyright 405w

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO... Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Lenny Rosenman, Bill Smith, Mort Subotnik, Roger Sessions, Seymour Shifrin, Jean-Claude Eloy, Charles Jones, Bob Erickson, Darius Milhaud, Pauline Oliveros, Leonard Klein, Lowell Cross, Jack Weeks, Bob Helps, David Del Tredici, Ivan Tcherepnin, Tikey Zes, Leonard Ralston, Jim Cleghorn, Ramon Sender, Wayne Peterson...

Mary James, Ronald Stoffel, Garry Samuel, Jake Krachmalnik, Greg Millar, Lois Bracwyne, Dave Kriedt, Pam and Ken Goldsmith, Dorothy Renzi, Sharon de Fremery, Chris Keene, Dorothy Franklin, Marvin Tartak, Dick Collins, Sidney Griller, Jo Heifetz, Richard Cummings, Duke Euphrat, Miriam Zunser, John Edmunds, Margo Blum, Carole Bogard, Bob Block, Dwight Pelzer, Austin Reller, Irene Sharp, Sabina Skalar...

ALL THOSE COMPOSERS AND PERFORMERS... who used to live here... and worked here... were actually working here... and now they're gone... who really loved it here and wanted to stay...

Well, almost all of them have gone off to be really appreciated someplace else, to earn lots more money, get a raise in rank (are professors really rank?), be famous, receive respect, and generally do ten times as many important things as ever. With some exceptions, not many dropouts. And one tragedy, since Eloy, barely 30, is dead 3 years now. I remember going to Paris in 1964 and running into him at the Domaine Musicale concerts. Eloy's music was a good ten stories higher than anything else that season. Even though an expatriate myself, I was excited to learn, a little later, that he would be at Cal-Berkeley. Well, and proud somehow...

In 20 years quite a parade of talent... out. Why out? Why not keep the gold in local cultural Fort Knoxes? Is the greatness so easy to come by? Shouldn't the most promising plants be sheltered and cherished? what is all this alienation?

That's the name of the game. Alienation. Les alienes -- in French it means crazy.

At the Radical Psychiatry place in Berkeley there's a lot of talk about alienated labor. Everybody's doing it, it seems.

Especially the Oakland Symphony, and maybe even the S.F. Symphony. And how about the pit-bands, and the stage-bands and all the groupings who get that way to earn a dollar?

Where does the spiral end? Why this big import-export business in music? Because we're a seaport? Maybe it's time to find a solution to the population problem starting with knowing what to do about talent and energy in the community.

--Lorraine QUICHE


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