TElephone EXchange NAmes in classical music

Sylvan Shulman (violin) and Alan Shulman (cello) founded the Stuyvesant String Quartet in 1938. How did the quartet get its name? Mura Kievman, daughter of Louis Kievman (viola) explains:

Dad told me (as I recollect, I may be wrong) that he created the name "Stuyvesant Quartet" when he was in a NYC phone booth and had to come up with a name NOW. The phone exchange was "STuyvesant" in that phone book [booth?], and hence the name. I also recall (perhaps equally incorrectly) that within the group there was some debate as to who actually came up with the name. This version was my father's recollection.

Telephone exchange names, offering inspiration in moments of need, perhaps apocryphally!

The Stuyvesant String Quartet on CD
The Stuyvesant String Quartet with Benny Goodman, clarinet
The New Friends of Rhythm (Jazzing the classics!)

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Telephone exchange names
More telephone exchange name nostalgia
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

Update: Alan Shulman's son Jay Shulman pointed me to two more CDs:

Rey de la Torre: Works for Guitar, with the Stuyvesant String Quartet
The Stuyvesant String Quartet: Hindemith, Villa-Lobos, Porter

(Thanks, Elaine! And thanks, Jay!)

"[T]races of ourselves"

Everything, everywhere; there, there:

After a certain age our memories are so interwoven with each other that the object of our thoughts or the book which we are reading has practically no importance. We have left traces of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries every bit as precious in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal's Pensées.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 508

*

I rode home through the city streets. There wasn't a street — there wasn't a building — that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school.

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, screenplay for My Dinner with André (1981) (words spoken by Shawn)

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Powders, pencils, mountains, cigars

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The nostalgia of the very young

A nice gloss on Faulkner's idea of peace as "was." Spoken by a second-grader:

"Oh, I wish I was in kindergarten again."

Why? Naps, and no homework.

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William Faulkner on peace

The sounds of sirens

Three fine examples of the ability to Keep Calm and Carry On, letters to the editor in the November 1940 Musical Times ("Founded in 1844, published on the fifteenth of every month"). The German Blitz had begun on September 7, 1940. "Feste," mentioned in the second letter, was the pen-name of a Musical Times columnist.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

William Faulkner on peace

Reading page after page in Proust's The Fugitive on remembering and forgetting made me recall this passage from William Faulkner, which has lurked in my mind since I first read it in college. It's from a conversation with students at the University of Virginia, March 13, 1957:

[M]aybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass of experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things — that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.

William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 67

Imaginary failed restaurants (no. 4)

The Seven Cs, serving chili, cornbread, carrot cake, coffee, cocoa, and chai.

The menu sounds charming. I have no idea why this restaurant went under. Perhaps the owners argued over whether carrot cake counted as one c or two.

More imaginary failed restaurants
'FroZen!
O'Saka's
Poi Vey

Imaginary failed fusion restaurants (no. 3)

Poi Vey: Traditional Hawaiian and Jewish cuisine.

Imaginary failed fusion restaurants (no. 2)

'FroZen!: Soul food and macrobiotic cooking.

Imaginary failed fusion restaurants (no.1)

O'Saka's, featuring traditional Irish cuisine and sushi.

And now I'm waiting for imaginary failed fusion restaurant no. 2 to show up.

Proust on self-plagiarism

Is being oneself (or one's self) merely copying? Ah, habit:

[W]hat we call experience is only the revelation to our own eyes of one of our own character traits, which recurs naturally, and recurs all the more powerfully if we have already on some previous occasion brought it up into the clear light of consciousness, so that the spontaneous reaction which had guided us the first time becomes reinforced by all the suggestions of memory. The kind of plagiarism which is most difficult for any human individual to avoid (and even for whole nations, who persist in reproducing their faults and aggravating them in so doing) is self-plagiarism.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 403

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Proust on habit and selfhood

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