I was looking for more more info regarding Charley White, the "famous referee" whose burial site I spotted at Calvary last week, when I spotted a provocative headline in a 1917 issue of The Evening Independent, a newspaper from Jacksonville, Florida.

The headline announces "City of Marvelous Light May Soon Be Doomed to Darkness" but offers no detail to back this claim. Instead the headline is followed by a nightime photo of the Woolworth Building taken by one Philip Ossa, a photographer (according to the paper) who spent three months photographing New York at night.

If I read the accompanying paragraph correctly it may be that Mr. Ossa’s series of photos was called "City of Marvelous Light" and the headline might indicate that the exhibit was soon to close.

I found no reference on the public Internet to a photographer by the name of Philip Ossa, but (contrary to common assumption) being unindexed on the Internet does not indicate that a person or thing never existed, nor is it a signal one way or the other of said person or thing’s cultural significance. I will try for some real research tools at the library or other means. I do not know offhand how unusual night photography was in 1917 but if the pictures survive then I bet they are interesting.

That same paper did have an obit for Charley White, whose reputation seems to validate the "famous referee" headline on his tombstone. When I first spotted that phrase on his tombstone I was reminded of a recent book that covered umpires in Major League Baseball. In an interview the author of that book mentioned that even the most religious baseball fans would have trouble naming one single umpire from anywhere across the history of the game. I would think the same is true of any of the major U.S. sports. But Charley White was a boxing referee whose name appears to have been well-known among pugilists far and wide.

Patelson Music House, it seems, had been on the verge of shutting down for 20 years before it was announced recently that the store would be closing.

I moved to New York in 1990 and remember a conversation with a fellow sitting next to me at a Carnegie Hall concert in November or December of that year. We talked about music, New York, and among other questions he asked me "Have you been to Patelson’s?" I said yes and he quickly added "You know they’re closing?"

Ever since that night in late 1990 (it was an Earl Wild concert on November 26, 1990) it seems as if any mention of Patelson Music House was followed by a knowing eulogy presaging the shop’s imminent demise. The only embellishment to these increasingly long-in-the-tooth predictions came in the form of follow-up assurances that the place was really going down this time, and that the rumors were really true after all. The rumors may have taken on new urgency following the death of Joseph Patelson in 1992, but the passing of the founder and namesake of the store seems to have had less impact on its business than did this current recession, poor management, and a general consumer trend away from buying books at retail stores.

I looked through my old receipts and was at first surprised to see how few items I seem to have purchased at Patelson’s in the past 18 years. I know I made more purchases than these receipts indicate — I remember buying the Paderewski edition of the Chopin Cello Sonata there, and at least one of the mammoth Godowsky volumes published by Carl Fischer (I bought the rest at Frank Music). Patelson’s reputation notwithstanding I find that I never really thought of it as a de facto source for music scores in the way I used to think Tower Records was the most reliable source for classical CDs and records. Tower’s physical stores lost out to the Internet but Patelson’s had other problems.

Patelson’s has been part of my midtown routine since moving here in 1990 but far more often than not I purchased nothing when I visited the place. If I could not find a particular score in the shelves I tended to fear the angry sales clerks to such a degree that I rarely asked them to see if it was in stock.

Some encounters with those clerks were memorable. I asked for a copy of Tchaikowsky’s G Major Piano Sonata and was assured with a confidence bordering on rudeness that no such thing existed. I got a similar reaction from a different clerk when I asked for the Dover edition of the Sibelius piano music. "Sibelius? Piano music? There is none." On another occasion I asked for a copy of the "’Trilogy’ Sonata" by Philip Glass and the clerk (who seemed to fear modern music) wanted no part of it, saying "I don’t know anything about that." I had to ask another clerk to get it for me.

The April 13, 2009, New York Times story describes Patelson’s as a "living room" for classical musicians, a description with which I begrudgingly agree. Most times I was there I would see one musician greeting another in an unexpected but not quite surprising meeting at Patelson’s.

Some would suggest that the store’s abundance of public domain music made it vulnerable to Internet downloaders who grab scores for free off web sites, file-sharing networks, and Usenet, but I find it hard to imagine that these factors made a significant dent in sales. Downloading scores for reference purposes is one thing but actually using them for performance is another order of arts-and-crafts tedium. I have done this myself and would much rather spend $20 on a printed volume versus laboriously printing these scores, hole-punching and collating them, putting them in folders, then dealing with the pages that get torn or go flying around for whatever reason. Printed volumes fall apart, too, but the home-made printouts of lengthy scores are a lot more trouble than just buying published copies.

Where the Internet comes through (whether it’s legal or not) is in access to obscure, out-of-print, and orphaned works that are never found at retail stores to begin with.

When I was there last week I overheard a customer saying he was visiting Patelson’s having "heard the bad news" and to lament the closing of what he called "the last greatness in New York." I did not say anything to him but I disagreed with his fussy sentiment. The Carl Fischer store at Cooper Union was a far greater shop than Patelson’s, not only on inventory but in its earthy, eccentric atmosphere.

I will miss Patelson’s. I always gravitated to the Alkan and Liszt sections, gawking at $80 volumes of beautifully engraved Liszt editions, books with hundreds of pages of pianistic effluvia containing only 2 pages of music I might actually want. A similar bin of random "Free Arrangements" and other Liszt obscurities used to exist over at Sam Ash on 47th Street — oh, is Sam Ash going out of business, too? Rats. Well, you can’t browse much at Frank Music but I think you still can browse at the Juilliard Bookstore. Maybe it is time to rediscover the library at Lincoln Center.

Patelson’s and Sam Ash seemed always to have some Liszt "Free Arrangements" volumes that sat there, unpurchased for years, like museum pieces to be contemplated. I purchased expensive volumes like those on occasion but for the most part my 4 large shelves of piano music scores do not get supplemented very often any more. I would not say I have every score I might ever need or want but it’s a comfortable library. Some of the volumes have been on my shelves since grade school.

If Patelson’s was the Living Room for classical musicians then what could replace or improve upon it? In the past I think that Tower Records and HMV were ersatz gathering places for the classical music audiences of this town. Academy Records might be a similar destination today, though I do not make it down to that store often enough to know. Any time I stepped into Patelson’s I half-expected to see a musician friend or acquaintance. I can not say that for any other place today.

In the past I have proposed to friends and colleagues a saloon called "Sorabji’s Place". Mo
deled after the great pugilist-themed "Jimmy’s Corner" pub on 44th Street in midtown Sorabji’s Place would be a classical piano bar. Where Jimmy’s Corner has pictures of the great boxers Sorabji’s Place would have pictures of the great pianists and a jukebox filled with smashmouth piano music of Liszt, Cziffra, and Alkan; and virtuoso obscurities by Pabst, Scharwenka, and Tausig. The daytime drinking crowd might hear the subdued but complex sound of York Bowen as small LED screens throughout the place show summary information about the composer and the music being heard. I think such a place could work if it is sincere and attracts the crowd that I know is out there — the crowd that sold out virtually every classical pianist documentary at the Walter Reade Theater several years ago.

Yes, that is what New York needs: Sorabji’s Place – A Classical Piano Saloon.