Parting is Such…A Song for David Salvage

One fateful morning in the fall of 2004, I opened the door to pick up my New York Times and found instead a wooden basket containing a pale homo sapien wearing large black glasses who appeared, at first glance, to be a nerdish cousin of Edgar Winter but, as it turned out,  was a young  graduate student named David Salvage, fresh out of Sweet Apple, Ohio.   David was pursuing a Ph.D. at CCNY while earning a few bucks on the side as a loneliness counselor at the late, lamented Tower Records classical shop.

This is about the time that I had decided to transform Sequenza21 into something more substantial than a pretext to get some free CDs and began switching the site to a blogging community. I recognize free labor when I see it and David was eager to help. He began doing reviews and writing posts and bringing other bright young composers and musicians into the family.

By 2006, the site was doing pretty well and David (along with another odd young man named Galen Brown) took the lead in organizing the first ever Sequenza21 live concert, persuading CCNY to lend us a space, and organizing musicians and all that.  It was roaring success despite the fact that it ran so long we didn’t get to eat David’s mother’s cookies and I got stuck with a $300 post-concert bar/restaurant tab because nobody would go home.

David and Galen were also the prime organizers of two terrific Sequenza21 concerts last year, in partnership with the Lost City Ramblers…what?  Oh, the wonderful Lost Dog Ensemble–one in Queens and one Manhattan.  I am happy to report that none of the Sequenza21 concerts involved any effort from me other than mailing the occasional check.

I talked to David dad at this year’s Manhattan concert and got some sense of what it is like for a perfectly normal, non-musical, Frank and Dino-loving, middle-class family from Sweet Apple, Ohio to be invested with a spooky kid who climbs up on the piano bench and starts noodling Bach at five-years-old and whose piano teacher tells you after a few months of training that “he’s got to have a better piano.”  Dad is still reeling from the sticker shock.

Dad has reason to be pleased now because David finally has a real job.  After a couple of busy years of indentured servitude for CCNY in Brooklyn, David finished and successfully defended his dissertation (on the other Hungarian, not Ligeti), got his doctorate, and is leaving New York this week to begin his new tenure-track position as an instructor in theory and composition at Hampden-Sydney College, located, oddly enough, in Sweet Apple, Virginia.

He assures us that he is not abandoning Sequenza21 and will be contributing from time to time and possibly even organizing a Sequenza21 concert in Washington,  which is the closest civilization to Sweet Apple.  Any co-conspirators in the DC area are invited to co-conspire.

All kidding aside, I have come to love David.  He’s done terrific things for Sequenza21, the concerts would not have happened without him. We wish him all the best.