Robert Cummings
I live in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, well known in the USA and other
parts of the world as the city where Little League Baseball was established.
Although I've dabbled in fiction with little success, the vast majority
of my writing has been in the area of music journalism and reviewing.
For more than twenty years I wrote reviews for Classical Net, as well
as other publications, both in print and web-based. I wrote reviews
here at MWI briefly in 2011 and then rejoined the staff in the summer
of 2018. While I've produced perhaps as many as two thousand reviews
in my career, I have well surpassed that number in writing close to
five thousand musicological articles, including over three thousand
composition descriptions, more than a thousand short biographies of
composers, performers, and ensembles and a number of opera and ballet
synopses. The musicological pieces were written for AllMusic.com, and
many of those articles were also published in the classical music reference
book, All Music Guide to Classical Music, available from Amazon.
I've been able to interview some interesting people in the world of
classical music, including Arcadi Volodos and Prokofiev's older son,
the late Sviatoslav Prokofiev. I can't really call myself a musician,
even though I studied piano in my youth in the 1950s. I selflessly gave
up the instrument in the interest of sparing family and neighbors the
regular purchase of earplugs: indeed, I wasn't exactly a Maurizio Pollini,
and would not likely have served well even as Pollini's page turner.
Okay, I wasn't quite that bad, as I eventually dabbled a bit in electronic
keyboard composition—and still do once in a great while.
Writing all these reviews and musicological articles (and doing the
research that went into them) comprised my second greatest musical learning
tool—the first greatest has been amassing and listening to my collection
of thousands of recordings over the years, including LPs, tapes, CDs,
SACDs, DVDs, Blu-rays and downloads. I don't really know the number
of recordings at this point: counting them isn't the problem any more,
it's finding the space for shelving them. The composers who dominate
my collection are, in this order: Prokofiev, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin,
Mozart, Mahler, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky,
Brahms, Verdi, Vaughan Williams, Wagner and Puccini. That's quite a
mixed group to say the least, as my tastes are obviously all over the
place. By the way, of the various review publications that I've written
for and have read, I consider MWI the very best.
