From the Alwinac: The UNC Greensboro Cello Collections, in Four Haikus

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Before the winter break I spent a few days among the Cello Collections at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Although I have visited the collections a number of times over the years, this last visit was especially memorable because I was helping oversee the cataloging of my own collection there.
    When I donated the bulk of the sheet music, books, and recordings that make up the collection, I had thought of it as a Bulgarian cello music collection and proposed naming it along those lines. But Stacey Krim, UNCG professor and curator of manuscripts, insisted that the collection should be under my name. I remember feeling very sheepish about the idea of my name appearing alongside such cello greats as Janos Starker, whom I could scarcely muster the courage to look in the eye as an IU graduate student thirty years ago. During my initial conversations with Prof. Krim, I poured my conflicting emotions into a poem:

Bulgarian bits
Near the Hungarian’s hits—
What Starker contrast?

And this one, a memory of Paul Tortelier’s fall 1989 visit to Bloomington, when I, to my own astonishment, was among the students “in the room where it happened” when he and Starker sightread a two-cello piece Tortelier had composed on the plane from his previous stopover, in Korea....
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean