Glenn Stallcop Composer, Performer
The Whole Truth
The upheaval of the Covid pandemic changed life in many unusual ways. One odd turn came from my wife Leslie’s participation on a fundraiser committee. Normally, the fundraiser would be in the form of an auction where donated items and (especially) events and dinner parties were put up for bid and sold for often outrageously inflated prices. It was a very fun and happy social affair.
But during the pandemic, social was not a possibility and so some sort of online event was the only possible course of action. They finally decided to have people submit videos of stories about things that had happened in their lives. The stories would then be incorporated into a live online “show” that charged for admission and asked for donations. This was a risky move, I thought, but, as it turned out, very successful. They put out an impassioned call for videos and received over two dozen in response.
I thought it was not only a good format for a fundraiser, but also a good format for an album! There was such a variety – lessons learned, misguided assumptions, a couple of wide-eyed encounters with racism, a funny story about a squirrel moving in, and a testimony on the benefits of dolls. I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t have been, about how many stories dealt with regret or, in some cases, life-long guilt. Maybe because it was the depths of the pandemic, but there was definitely an attitude of “clearing the air” about a lot of the stories.
Some of the stories in this fundraiser have been hinted at in this album, the rest of the stories are my own. There is nothing about the music which could identify it with the original except for possibly the mood. I leave it for the listener to add the details.
The first track, Stuck in the Snow, is a story my wife told of working late as a teacher in our rural school only to find a snow storm had blown in while she was grading papers. After a failed attempt at driving home, she wound up sleeping in the teacher’s lounge. The story then tells of her encounter with a high school student who had been given a job as a “night watchman” by the principal after he had been thrown out of his parent’s home. It was quite touching.
Out on a Ledge refers to a bout of my own youthful idiocy at the Grand Canyon. My friend had told me that whenever he saw the Grand Canyon, he always felt like it was something Disney had put up. When I first saw it, I had a similar feeling because of the difficulty of grasping its vastness. At one of the viewpoints, there was this large rock with a ledge on it that seemed to go all the way around the rock. I thought getting on the ledge would make the experience more “real.” Indeed it did, as I found that on the back side the ledge had broken away. With no handholds, a sobering look at the 1500 foot drop, and a couple of hearty gusts of wind, I managed to back my way along the edge on shaky knees.
I Wish I Had That One Back is a story about how a woman’s parent’s anger had influenced how they approached parenting until they realized what was going on. There’s No Sure Thing is a classic “counting your chickens” story involving real estate. Never Gets Caught is a curious story about how a little white lie on an employment application haunted this person throughout their successful forty-year career.
Haunting Encounter refers to an experience I had in which I mistakenly misidentified someone as an old acquaintance when I was at a store downtown. We talked for several minutes, I referred to things we had done together, and we had a very amicable chat. I found later that it couldn’t have possibly been that person as he had died a few years earlier. I don’t know who the person I met was, and was amazed that he had led me on and gone along with it the whole time. Or maybe I should believe in ghosts.
The Last Time I Saw Them is not really a story, but one of those meaningful events. I had not seen this person in over 40 years though we had followed each other’s careers. We had dinner, shared stories and some of each others work, but shortly afterward he was involved a head-on collision and died instantly.
A musician’s life is not the most secure choice. Most musicians live a free-lance feast-or-famine sort of existence. My main source of income has been as a musician in a symphony orchestra, which is a quantum leap above free-lance, but by no means rock solid. My orchestra position has always been susceptible to poor fundraising and bad management not to mention the fickle whims of musical taste. There have been times when my job’s future may have been sketchy, but I always felt I had the ability to get by through gigging, teaching or, as a last resort, finding another job.
But there was never a time like the full scale shut down of the music profession brought on by the Covid pandemic. Nobody was working, period, not free-lancers, not soloists, not stars, not anybody! I was lucky in that I had recently retired, but I was still doing some playing and gigging. Then, all of a sudden, nada! And it lasted for a year and a half.
As a composer, I do most of my work by myself, isolated. So I did quite a bit of writing when the pandemic started but, after a while, I realized that nobody was interested because nobody was working. Some musicians decided it was a good time to do a solo album, and I got two commissions for unaccompanied string pieces.
The title, “Divertimenti” is a reference to pieces dating from the Classical period, which were meant to be performed in social settings like a party. They were literally meant to be diversions or entertainment. I enjoyed the irony of putting together an album of diversions in forced isolation. My diversions are just ways to keep busy or pass the time interspersed with some realities of this rather exotic but intense ordeal. The cover hints at one of my diversions, drawing. I spent most of the pandemic at my cabin near Ash Fork, AZ and had lots of time and things to draw.
I put together a number of albums during the pandemic. Time, as I said, was not in short supply. Only a couple of these albums focus on the pandemic itself, however. Why rub it in? We all went through it. Besides, though a reckoning with ones own mortality can be very worthwhile, there’s only so much we can take. At some point, we’re going to need a diversion.