I had been reviewing concerts and theater for five years before the pandemic and it had become a pattern of my life. The pace was frenetic – with three or four performances to cover each week and turning in reviews as fast as possible, usually the next morning after a very late evening. In late February 2020 there was a concert I had been asked to review. It was modern music and some of the composers were young musicians from my town whose work I had never heard. I started to find out as much about them and their previous work as I could. The concert was disorganized. The organizer had neglected to copy programs and when I finally received one hot off the photocopier, I saw that the program had changed somewhat. It had billed a performance of Pauline Oliveros' Rock Piece as a Philadelphia premiere. That was blatantly incorrect. First of all, I had already heard this piece twice in Philadelphia. Secondly, I think the piece is totally absurd and dreaded having to endure it. It may have been brilliant when Pauline Oliveros had her original idea and wrote the piece in 1979, but the newness fades after you have heard it once. She instructed performers to hand out two rocks to each member of the audience and ask them to choose a rhythmic pattern and stick to it while their neighbors pick other patterns and do the same. When you experience it the first time, it is fun and slightly challenging to resist copying your neighbor's rhythm. The second time, it feels silly. This was my third time, so I was recalcitrant, but determined not to spoil it for anyone who had not experienced it. The organizer wanted us to fade out our rock beating and allow the following piece to fill in the void. We crashed at the end, several people unsure of how to stop: slow down, fade out, or what? Tap, silence, crash…giggle. Finally, the expert musicians playing the subsequent piece entered the void left by our awkward fishtailing. How could I review that shambles? I wrote: If you have never heard Rock Piece, you might enjoy your first opportunity to beat rocks together, but by the time you are handed rocks again for the next performance, you may sigh like a kindergartner asked to repeat an easy task. I did not challenge his claim that his concert was the Philadelphia premiere as I thought that would have been a bit mean. I did say we did not do a good job of setting up the atmosphere for the commissioned piece that followed: “What happened was a bit of a train wreck as the audience refused to stop clicking their rocks when the commissioned premiere began.” The rest of the concert was great and I reviewed it in positive terms and high praise, but the organizer was furious. He commented: “I suspect Ms. (Reviewer) was the kindergartner who can't take direction in this equation.” He went on to berate my lack of knowledge and competence and added that this is the twenty-first century (ignoring the fact that the piece in question was written in the previous one). His irate words really stung me and felt like an attack of my person rather than of my review. He added biting phrases like “one can only lament the halcyon days when a credible, respectable, reviewer would put in even the smallest effort to inform themselves of the music they were about to hear.” The attack felt so threatening and diminished my self-confidence so severely that I simply stopped writing reviews. It mattered little as there were so few performances after Philadelphia and so many other cities went dark on March 16, 2020. I began to explore other options for writing – delving into other areas relating to music, but in light of historical events rather than live performance. Two years later, I was asked to review a concert with a premiere by another composer commissioned by my aggressive detractor. I accepted, thinking I needed to face the monster once and for all. I looked up everything I could to prepare myself – and that is saying a lot as I spend an excessive amount of time on research before I review a concert. Soon after it was published, I received a forwarded email from my editor. The composer whose piece I had reviewed was delighted with my positive review and asked if I would review a compact disc of his compositions. A feeling of calm fell over me. Anyone might object to how I perceive their music, but that does not mean I should hide from them. It would be more productive for me to embrace their remarks and learn from them. I have taken time to reread my detractor's comments several times recently and I now see that if I want to continue reviewing, I should be prepared for reactions – not outwardly, but inwardly. Now that we are having more performances and I have started to review them again, I feel much stronger than before. I am accepting fewer assignments and spending more time trying to polish the reviews I accept.

Podcast transcript: Good afternoon! I'm Gail Nobles, and we have come to the New Retro. The song I'm about to play reminds me of the story of split personality. There's a good side and there's an evil side, and we don't want the evil side. We don't want our personalities split. The title of the next song is “ The Ballad of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Taylor Casey. .. https://www.spreaker.com/user/gnaudio/dr-jekyll-mr-hyde-by-taylor-casey-9-16-2

Have you ever wondered what it's like to have four or five, or maybe more, songs stuck in your head? Imagine having that many people crammed into a small room and all desperately vying for your attention. Now imagine that, in a classroom, when you really want to sing so they leave you alone. But you can't, because a) you'd look like a total weirdo and b) there are other people trying to focus. That's an average day for me. Music is a big part of my family's culture, and it has a lot of meaning for me even beyond that. I think about this a lot: what if we could use music as a tool to connect with people? What if we could use it to tell stories and bring communities together? Growing up, my dad was a music enthusiast. We're a big family - eight kids, all from the same parents - so we made a lot of dishes at dinner. We live in an old farmhouse with no dishwasher, so at the end of the day, we'd all clean the kitchen and do the dishes together. This was in the days before Spotify and iTunes, back in the mid-2000s to early-2010s so if we wanted music, we had to sing. And sing we did. My dad would lead the melody and my sisters would sing harmony and to my eight-year-old ears, there was nothing more beautiful. The world was at its brightest when we were singing together. It made - actually, still makes - you feel like you're part of something greater than the sum of its parts. Even before I was born, my family was musical. So much so that I began to recognize certain songs in the womb, and to put me to bed when I was little, you had to sing "One Hand On The Radio" by Aengus Finnan or I wouldn't sleep. I'm seventeen now. I'm going to be a part of the senior music class, studying in-depth music theory and refining our skills on our chosen instruments - the flute, for me. This class has reinforced what my childhood led me to believe: when you're involved in music, you become part of a greater whole, on two levels. The first level is the local community. I've met some amazing people through music, people that otherwise I'd have no way of knowing. It draws strangers together, with all different strengths and weaknesses, and helps them overcome their failings to create art. Painters use pigments to decorate space, but musicians use sound to decorate time. Being part of that is a spectacular feeling, but one that's quite impossible to describe to someone who hasn't felt it before. The second level is the global community. Just about everyone I know has at least a superficial appreciation for music in some form. If you showed someone from the other side of the world a classical piece like Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, they'd have a hard time denying that it's beautiful music. Even if you think it's boring, you can certainly appreciate the skill required to play the pieces. This is true for many other forms of music too, not just classical. Music is a community thing and it's meant to be shared. I could go to Europe or the Middle East or Africa and find another musician to play with, regardless of lingual, cultural, or social differences and perform a piece with them. As long as we can both read music, we can let go of the barriers of society. As a musician, I'm not constrained like others are. My art form allows me a certain kind of freedom and a crazy connection to others that can't be taken away from me. You can't unlearn something, after all. So whether you just listen to music when it plays on the radio or you're a fanatic like me who listens to everything under the sun, remember that music is much more than nicely organized sound. Imagine a scene from your favourite movie, a very emotional one. Now remove the background music, and you're left with something a little more shallow. Music is the language that communicates beyond words and extends beyond the barriers of language. It is the one thing that can speak to anyone no matter where you are or what your culture is. It's the universal language and using it, we can connect with all kinds of people. And in a world that's so divided, so disjointed, couldn't we use a little more unity?

So I have a range of unreleased music that needs to be heard!