A long time ago, from a music conservatory far far away, I took out a classified ad in a national music magazine. It was a small ad, 5- or 6-lines deep and probably ¾” wide. The ad invited composers to send me their piano music, which I might play at a “well known conservatory.” I don’t think that was a pompous or vacant boast. A degree from that conservatory has not been a magic word that has opened any doors for me, but its reputation was and remains quite respectable, and I think it was fair enough to assume that composers of all reputations might find the proposition inviting.
People I knew at the conservatory made fun of me for years because of that ad, not because I placed it or because I claimed that we all attended a “well known conservatory.” They made fun of me because I intentionally spelled my name wrong in the ad, substituting a Y for the final S and giving myself a harmless pseudonym of “M. Thomay”. The references to Mel Tormé were inevitable but really, I think the good-natured ridicule from friends and colleagues was simply because it sounded funny and also because they thought it was a damned clever idea. I used this alternate name so I could know where the mail was coming from, in response to which ad I had placed in that magazine or potentially others. If I took out another such ad in a different music magazine I might have called myself “M. Thomaz”, for instance, so I could know which pieces of postal mail came from that advertisement in that magazine.
A surprising quantity of piano music arrived at my Main Street apartment, where I platonically shared a one-bedroom apartment with a beautiful Hawaiian woman. The apartment was located upstairs from an Army Navy store, and when the envelopes were too large to fit in the mailbox of our apartment they were sometimes left by the postal delivery person at the counter of the store with one of the clerks there. Those folks were in on the M. Thomay canard, too, but none of us at the store knew each other well enough to riff on it with the gusto of friends who’d known each other for years.
Some of the music was quite fine. I remember a composer from Miami, a city I never associated with having much of a new music scene, sending a lengthy piano piece that felt like the stuff of Carlos Surinach, or even a mix of late Scriabin and Ernesto Lecuona. Another composer, pretty well-established and whose name I recognized, sent a tranquil one-page ditty from New York. I included that piece on some of my programs in the years to come.
I look these names up now and find that the one from Miami would be 60 now but I can’t find anything about him later than 2006. One of his CDs is up for grabs on Amazon for 86¢. I might be inclined to snarf one just to see if he’s out there and his attention is piqued. I looked up the other name and find that the dude appears to be 80 years and still active in the New York music scene, conducting an orchestra of mostly bassoons in premiere performances of works by himself and others. I don’t see any of my performances listed in his chronology but why would they be included? Those happened 25+ years ago and brought no particular attention to either of us.
Those two composers might have been the highlights of music collected through the M. Thomay canard, which I only call a canard to keep the joke running. I think it was a reasonably legitimate way of filtering postal mails.
If those were the highlights the rest might be called otherwise. One piece of piano music, at about 100 pages, would have taken over 2 hours to perform, but that is if performing it was even possible. A MIDI rendering of the piece had rapid-fire arpeggios blazing up and down and all around the keyboard at speeds simply beyond possibility for any two human hands to attain. Thoughts of Conlon Nancarrow, who punched many of his scores directly into piano rolls, entered my mind, making me imagine what that outlaw composer might have done with MIDI technology. But this composer was no Nancarrow. It was page after page of hypothetical piano music that skilled human pianists would find laughable.
At present I can recall no other composers’ music from that time, except for one. Not only did I happen to discover copies of this person’s music last night among my boxes filled with papers that I recently brought back home from storage, but this person and I crossed paths on Facebook just a few hours ago. I don’t know if he remembers my name anymore but I certainly recall his, and am happy to see that my little screed about him that I posted in 1997 is still out there, but like most of my web creations it remains blacklisted from the search engines for reasons unknown and unknowable. I just found it by searching the file system and it’s pretty harsh, so maybe I should be lucky it’s not publicly indexed:
Speaking of worthless composers, ___, if you are searching the internet for your name I hope you find this, because I want you to know how much I fucking hate you, and how much you pissed me off in 1990 with your pathetic piano compositions and asshole selfishness. You still owe me $300, too, you stupid cocksucker.
Yikes. That’s… harsh. That might sound like the writings from a less litigious time but no times are non-litigious. I think it more accurately echoes how, even up through the mid to late 1990s when someone like me had a corporate job where some of my colleagues read every word on my websites, it still felt like I could put anything out there about almost anybody to no damn consequence. Whatever the atmosphere of the timing I felt then and still feel justified in being angry at being stiffed out of $300 at a time in my life when I could least afford to be robbed like that. It might be worth it for posterity if the music this person sent me was worth the dick he used to write it with, but there is not even that to imagine looking forward to in the form of this composer being discovered as an unknown great.
Oh, wait. I see now. I remember why that page is not on the searchies anymore. In a drunken spiral of self-loathing I ordered legitimate search engines to de-index my original web site, The Place of General Happiness. I may have had to get drunk to do it but I did have genuine and legitimate intentions of polishing that site off, cleaning up dead links and such, and maybe fixing some typos. I intended to keep that old site pretty much what it’s been since I closed it in 1997. I was going to stick it under tpogh.sorabji.com, slap ads on it, and make a lot of money. Or rather, I was going to polish it off of its dead links and some typos, make a static offline version of the whole site, and copy it to CDs which I would leave at thrift shops and in random postal mailboxes wherever I may go. The latter scenario was and still is far more likely. I invested $2 in a spindle of about 100 640mb CDs found at a thrift shop just for this purpose.
