Friday, December 18, 2015

September 30, 2009: Thomas Hampson celebrates American song

Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, baritone Thomas Hampson offered one of the most interesting preview events I have ever attended.  The preview was for his Song of America recital, which he will give tonight to inaugurate the 30th anniversary season of San Francisco Performances;  and it was entitled "Song of America – A Diary."  Literally speaking, this was probably not the most accurate title.  With my credentials as a veteran of Silicon Valley, I could make a case that "technology pitch" would probably have been more accurate a choice than "diary;"  but Hampson is clearly so personally invested in this effort that what turned out to be a demonstration of a technology about to be launched was tightly woven with his own personal narrative of his involvement in the project.

The technology was developed under the Song of America Project, which is a product of Hampson's collaboration with the Library of Congress under support from the Hampsong Foundation.  The primary "deliverable" will be a Song of America Web site, whose URL (www.SongOfAmerica.net) has already been reserved but which currently offers only a "Coming soon!" page.  Hampson spent about an hour with his Macintosh laptop showing us all what to expect, after which he introduced three of his major Library of Congress colleagues:  Susan H. Vita, Chief of the Music Division, Loras John Schissel, Senior Musicologist in the Music Division, and Suzanne Hogan, Special Assistant to the Librarian of Congress.  Brad Rosenstein, Curator of Exhibitions & Programs at the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design then moderated a question-and-answer session with the audience.  Hampson had more than his fair share of encounters with Murphy's Law while giving his demonstration;  and, as a skilled performer who seems to be able to work his way through any adverse situation, he always knew how to keep the presentation moving forward.  If his personal enthusiasm led him down more paths of digression than I could count, he always returned to the main path, keeping the entire evening on message.

That message was that, for Hampson, the scholarship behind his preparing American songs for his performing repertoire has been (and continues to be) a wild and wooly adventure, as exciting and satisfying as performing the music itself before an audience.  Hampson now sees the Internet as the perfect venue for having those adventures;  and the Library of Congress has committed itself to enabling such adventures in a variety of topic areas.  Now, with the support of the Hampsong Foundation, it will soon be enabling those adventures that most interest Hampson's professional side as a performer.

I have sat through so many technical pitches that it is hard for me to approach any of them without a thick skin of skepticism.  From a musicological point of view, they tend to follow a ternary form:  a gee-whiz exposition, followed by a "development" section about monetization and business strategies, concluding with a gee-whiz recapitulation.  Somewhere during the follow-up questioning, it emerges that this is all vaporware waiting to become substance once the business plan is up and running.

Last night's presentation did not follow this pattern, nor did it need to.  That Library of Congress commitment to enabling scholarly adventures is part of both its charter and its budget, and Hampson's foundation can supplement that budget in the interest of those musical adventures that mean so much to him.  This is what many of us have wanted from the Internet since those early dark days (about fifteen years ago) when academics were raking in government grants for digital library projects that never seemed to have professionally qualified librarians (or any other form of "context expert") on the research staff.  Will this really be the dawn of a new day?  Who knows?

The good news is that the Hampsong Foundation has offered to help recruit beta testers when the first round of content is opened to the Internet.  Hampson invited those wishing to volunteer for beta testing to send their request to songofamerica@hampsong.org.  I intend to be one of those volunteers.  There is not a review that I write that does not depend on some level of adventurous research;  so I have a dog in this hunt, whether Hampson (who may well be on the receiving end of what I write) likes it or not!  I also need to do this out of a sense of fairness.  I have put a lot of effort into writing about how the Internet offers concert experiences through cyberspace.  If there is now an opportunity to enhance those concert experiences by seeking out useful context through the Internet, that should be recognized as yet another path towards our all being better listeners and examined as such.

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