RIP Richard Nanes
I was going to add this to the comment thread here, but the system is apparently choking on my URLs, as if I was going to spam my own blog
Here's his obituary.
I see his website hasn't been updated yet. And this hasn't hit the Gaylord Music Library obituary page yet.
I don't know if "DN" is Daryl Nanes, his nephew....if so, I am sorry for your loss. But really, "hatefulness?" I re-read this, and the only bit that could be construed as ad hominem is my crack about short-bus special. The rest is entirely about the music. And if you're going to represent yourself as a composer, particularly with the excessive puffery of Nanes' approach to self-promotion, you should expect that people will judge your music, one way or the other. He may indeed have been a perfectly delightful man. But he sucked as a composer. So did Thomas Fawick, another entrepreneur/musician (from Cleveland), but Fawick stuck to salon pieces, and didn't have the budget or modern media to hawk his pieces.
Now Richard Nanes belongs to the ages. I predict that the ages will forget him, but I could be wrong. We remember Florence Foster Jenkins, Silas G. Pratt ("The Wagner of America"), Bulwer-Lytton, and various other panache-filled figures.
Comments
Posted by: Ed DeWan
Posted on: February 7, 2010 02:49 PM
"But he sucked as a composer."
Well, you suck as a commentator! I have recently acquired the Nanes string quartets, performed by the Budapest, and I find them powerful and enchanting. This was a modern composer with the soul of a Beethoven. Of course, I haven't heard any of his other music, which, for all I know, could be a load of crap. What puzzles me is why I had never heard of him before.
Posted by: John Arbuckle
Posted on: February 25, 2010 02:26 AM
Here is to another musician, a patient mentor and a friend. May he rest in peace!