Issue 52

J.S. Bach’s works for solo violin are compositional marvels that show off the instrument’s potential while allowing the musician to indulge in intellectual and emotional exploration. In three recent recordings, violinists have taken on the challenge of proving themselves worthy of this glorious music.

German violinist Christian Tetzlaff  (seen above) is the rare bird who can genuinely be said to play Baroque and Romantic composers equally well. If this were only a matter of technique, the accomplishment would not be so rare. It takes a deep understanding of the way European musical language changed through the centuries. Tetzlaff is not an early-music specialist, but he gets Bach at a deep level. His 2017 recording on the Ondine label of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (his third recording of the cycle) proves that. Again.

I tend to test a player’s Baroque sea-legs, so to speak, by seeing how they do with preludes or similar opening movements, intended in the tradition to have an improvisatory sound even when they were carefully composed, as Bach’s were. So, here’s Tetzlaff playing the Preludio that opens the Partita No. 3 in E major. Fiery yet precise, with a clear declamation of all those polyphonic layers that Bach gives to the violin one note at a time, like the tiny folds in a huge origami castle.

Maybe the secret of Tetzlaff’s sound is his ability to wield razor-sharp technical mastery with both massive strength and lacy delicacy. The Fuga from the Sonata No. 1 in G minor is a jungle bloom floating on the tide; you worry that a wave will crush its wondrous beauty.

Of course, any review of the Sonatas and Partitas must by law mention the beloved Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor. Baroque authenticity hard-liners will argue with the tempo, the amount of rubato, the vibrato. True, those aspects are all “wrong” from the standpoint of historically informed performance. Nevertheless, this particular recording is an explosion of color and light that left me breathless. Tetzlaff gives clear purpose to every one of Bach’s harmonic motions, painting them in an endless range of dynamics and textures for intricate emotional effect.

Bach’s hand-written score of the violin sonatas and partitas was marked with the German phrase “Sei Solo” (Let it be a solo). That instruction was necessary in the late Baroque because everyone assumed that melodic instrumental and vocal music would be accompanied at the very least by some instrument that could play chords. That was the default, you might say. So those unaccompanied works were somewhat unusual – not for Bach, but for the Baroque in general.

Nevertheless, in the early 1720s Bach did also write six of the more common type of violin sonata, where the solo instrument is supported by harpsichord. This is not quite the same as traditional basso continuo, because in these Bach sonatas the harpsichord part is almost entirely written out rather than using “figured bass,” the chord abbreviations common at the time. During Bach’s time, the word “Sonata” implies a suite of four or five movements with Italian tempo markings.

Happily, all six of Bach’s Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord have recently come out in a riveting recording from Harmonia Mundi, featuring violinist Isabelle Faust and harpsichordist Kristian Bezuidenhout.

The opening Adagio of the Sonata 1 in B minor, BWV 1014 is more aching than stately, which prepares the listener for Faust’s approach to this music. Bezuidenhout starts on his own, and then Faust enters subtly, as if her violin were an outgrowth of his harpsichord.

Instead of giving declaratory statements, her phrases in the slow movement meander, like Ophelia’s songs before she drowns. That sound is thanks in part to Faust’s use of gut strings to give her late-17^th century instrument an authentic Baroque timbre. She’s also avoiding vibrato, which makes each pull of her bow like a keening. The slight madness of the violin line reminds me of Andrew Manze’s “stilus phantasticus” recordings and concerts with his trio Romanesca some twenty years ago.

The second movement, although it’s marked Allegro, refuses to be chipper. Each phrase seems to find Faust and Bezuidenhout reaching for something. The perfection of their ensemble is almost beyond belief. Every tiny pause or lift at phrase ending or climax could be a single creature breathing.

But Faust is not stuck in some thick emotional cocoon. When she needs to shake off the drama, she does so, as in the Sonata 2 in A major, BWV 1015. She and Bezuidenhout take the tempo marking of the third movement, Andante un poco (literally, “going a little”) to heart with a rather brisk walking pace. This exquisite movement has a highly ornamented French style, which Faust executes with convincing majesty.

The Presto that closes the second sonata flows swiftly without any sense of being rushed; I imagine it’s how someone in an 18^th century courts would need to appear entirely in control even if she were late to dinner with the king. Quick and purposeful, not strident or panicked.

None of the tracks of this excellent recording are available on YouTube, but you can hear all six sonatas on Spotify:

And here’s a charming and informative interview with the two artists discussing their instruments and this repertoire:

Mastering these works is not as easy as some might imagine. Guido de Neve also recorded the accompanied sonatas recently on the Etcetera label, with fellow Belgian Frank Agsteribbe on harpsichord. There’s less skill and magic in this pairing than we get from the Faust/Bezuidenhout duo.

De Neve seems to consider these sonatas to be solo works with backing, rather than a seamless and equal joint effort. That effect is surely helped along by the sound production – the harpsichord is less acoustically prominent than the violin – but it’s also in de Neve’s playing. You can hear this in the opening Largo of Sonata 4 in C minor, BWV 1017. The violin’s voice is detached, floating above Agsteribbe’s key-strikes rather than in tandem with them, as if the harpsichord were weaving a safety net below.

The cooperation between players is more convincing in Sonata 5 in F minor, BWV 1018, but that accomplishment is undermined by some baffling musical choices. For example, they play the fourth movement like an Allegretto (if you’re being generous), but Bach marked it Vivace. This is not my definition of lively:

Pop over to Spotify right now and listen to Faust and Bezuidenhout skip nimbly through the same movement. You’ll be glad you did.

I can’t imagine a more auspicious start to an indie songwriter’s career than the one Jesca Hoop had in the early 2000s. She was nanny to the children of Tom Waits. Understandably impressed by her idiosyncratic musical efforts (something he knows a thing or two about), Waits introduced her to industry folks who would appreciate her unconventional work.

Hoop’s voice is rich and her style odd. As a Californian who’s made England her home, she lets in the edges of British vowels and consonants, giving her a mystifying, Audrey Hepburn-like accent. But it never sounds affected, only like a true glimpse of what she hears in her own head. Actually, that’s not a bad way to describe her songs in general.

She started with a bang, releasing the album Kismet in 2007. In “Seed of Wonder” you can hear the articulate nature of her thoughts, both lyrical and musical. Just as characteristic is the way ideas cross over and bump into each other. The words come non-stop, phrases growing sideways from other phrases. And the harmony pops into new keys – and the melody into new registers — with no warning.

The rhythmic opening of “Intelligentactile 101” shows Hoop’s reggae influence, a flavor that brings a zing to her early songs. You can tell a lot about her musical personality by listening to that accompaniment, the way it hops around, sometimes obscuring the downbeat, introducing a distorted electronic ghost voice in a way that backup singers would normally be used. And through it all, acoustic folk instruments like mandolin keep the sound from going too pop. The high-pitched, breathy voice makes you expect a vacuous bubble-gum love song, but there’s an intense braininess behind the fluff. I don’t think Hoop would be offended by a comparison to the B-52’s.

Another early song that teaches the listener a lot about Hoop is “Silverscreen” (which she also rerecorded this as an acoustic track for the 2011 EP Snowglobe). The lyrics and their delivery drip with self-deprecating humor while this unapologetically modern woman imagines herself as a delicate, gossamer film star in Hollywood’s golden age. Maybe more to the point, Hoop seems to have the mind of a director, constantly juggling and planning a hundred things at once. Her songs sound like the inside of that kind of brain.

In 2009 Hoop released the album Hunting My Dress. For “Whispering Light,” she lets fellow singer/songwriter Willy Mason take the lead vocals while she backs him up. Oh, that dissonant melody! With lyrics that (as far as I can tell) paint life as analogous to a trek through the wilderness, what could be more appropriate than those surprising painful notes and weird rhythmic turns?

As an independent mind and a bit of an enigma, Hoop is inspired by other artists who rebel against society’s expectations. For her 2012 album, The House That Jack Built, she created an homage to one of the great iconoclasts of the early 21^st century, the London graffiti artist and political activist known as Banksy.

“Ode to Banksy” begins “My pencil is dull, my pencil is dull, there’s not much lead left in my pencil.” That lyrical silliness turns to dark humor (a dig at Banksy’s overly distilled political imagery, maybe?) with lines like “Suicide bombers just need a hug.” The song has a bouncy American punk feel reminiscent of early Talking Heads.

Also from The House That Jack Built is “Peacemaker,” which continues that multi-layered, high-energy, electronic aesthetic. The medievalist poetic imagery is rich, even if its meaning is murky. It’s about men’s strengths versus women’s. It’s about the irony of going to war for the sake of peace. But primarily, it’s about sex, and the lurid refrain moans with primal lust, all the easier to hear through the bedroom wall because the instruments have gone quiet. (Explicit lyric warning.)

Gentle in its darkness, “Murder of Birds,” from the 2014 album Undress, displays both Hoop’s admirable acoustic guitar chops and the hauntingly wide range of her voice. She leaps and scoops, shaping each musical phrase like a sculptor’s curved tool plucking at wet clay. As ever, the rhythmic structure changes. The meter loosens from straight duple time to lilting 6/8 twice, signifying the change from painful reality to wishful thinking.

Hoop’s most recent album is Memories Are Now (2017). The music videos and promotion have been pumped up a notch, but Hoop is her old self: free from strict meter and traditional production concerns. She’s grown beyond the eye-twitching dissonances of her earlier work, but there’s still nothing conventional about her. The title song is a break-up declaration, as bursting with defiance and personal strength as you’d expect (no sitting and weeping in the corner for this woman), and no less powerful for being served on a platter of nothing but spare guitar patterns and tambourine.

The album’s final track is “The Coming.” It’s slow and aching and rewards patience. As with “Memories Are Now,” the accompaniment is barely there. This ballad succeeds in the impossible task of being both hopeless and hopeful at the same time: She’s taking on her doubts about religious faith; it seems these doubts have changed her way of thinking about everything. Pulling together the language to effectively express such difficult thought processes and internal conflicts is very rare. If you need proof that Jesca Hoop is an important spokesperson for the human condition, this is it.

I wrote about ephemera back in Copper #37. In that column I wrote (and I’m quoting myself because I don’t think I can say it any better now): “I also learned that there was a fancy name for the category of collectibles that included those [train] schedules, along with brochures, flyers, catalogs—all the stuff that was never expected to be saved. Because of the inherently ephemeral nature of such things—here today, gone tomorrow—that category is known as ephemera (ee-FEM-er-uh). A lovely name, no? Almost Biblical.”

Our itinerant recording engineer/DIY builder of things that don’t usually burst into flames, Duncan Taylor, plopped a black leatherette binder in front of me this morning. Having been bitten in the ass by all manner of legal documents in the past, I cautiously lifted the corner of the cover.

“This was my granddad’s stuff, ” Dunc said, as I leafed through a sheaf of receipts, warranty cards, manuals, booklets, and product literature. The stuff was all about audio gear—amps, tuners, speakers, cartridges, and turntables, from the ’50s to the ’70s.

“I guess the tube doesn’t fall far from the amplifier,” I said.

“Yeah, I got the bug from him,” Duncan said.

So what was in that binder?

My first impression was that I’d unearthed one of my Dad’s innumerable files. Dad also stashed receipts and warranty cards for things long-vanished from the face of the Earth. I’m not sure if pack-rattery was a trait of the Depression generation, or if it was just a coincidence. But there they were, dozens of palm-sized yellow and white paper receipts with the familiar bluish tracery of a multi-leaf pad, with the spidery handwriting and occasional misspellings characteristic of human effort. These days the anonymous machine-printed thermal paper receipts provide no evidence of human involvement, and that damned thermal crap will likely fade away in a decade. Someday, future generations will look at their forebear’s file folders, filled with slightly-sticky pieces of paper, all blank—and those future archaeologists will wonder, “what the hell—“.

Anyway. Not the case here. I recognized some of the companies listed on the receipts: David Beatty Stereo and Burstein-Applebee were still around in Kansas City back when I started in audio. House of Sound and Sight of West Palm Beach was still around in the ’70’s; that receipt in the center is for a P-E (Perpetuum-Ebner, a peculiar name, even more-peculiarly revived) turntable and a Bang & Olufsen SP-14 cartridge.  The Allied receipts—a whole pile of them—all say “Allied Radio Shack”. I hadn’t realized that Allied was also a Tandy property in the chain’s declining years. Even more surprising was the discovery, courtesy of Wikipedia, that Allied is still around as a wholesale distributor.

 

Stuff. And lots of it.

Sorting the binder’s contents by category—once a student librarian, always a student librarian—I discovered a familiar batch of material from Audio Research Corporation, familiar because I’d received much of it from ARC myself. God bless those patient manufacturers who faithfully responded to the handwritten requests of 16-year-old me.

What I never had was a letter from company President, Bill Johnson, though I met him a number of times.  Duncan’s grandfather, Dr. James McVay, may have been  known to Johnson, judging by the friendly tone of the note. The rest of the batch was the familiar stuff: info on the then-new Dual 75 amp, news of the Magneplanar speakers then distributed by ARC, a schematic of the Dual 51, and the literature for the SP-3A-1 preamp. Not only had I had all the paper material, I’d had a tri-amped set of Maggie Tympanis with D-51s and D-75. The passive crossover is news to me (I’d had an electronic crossover, the EC-4), and it was good to see the familiar name of Wendell Diller—still around as Magneplanar’s sales manager.

There were a few other pieces of literature and ephemera from the late ’60’s and ‘early ’70s: a JBL warranty card  from the Arnold Wolf period (’69-’80) for the classic LE8T fullranger;  a brochure for the AR-5, little brother to the AR-3a; an Empire full-range brochure, complete with cheesy sexist pics. 

But the mother lode was an assortment of material from the mid-to-late ’50s. Some of it was really eye-opening.

You guessed it: we’ll go into those goodies in the next issue of Copper. 

[Back in Copper #44 I devoted a Vintage Whine column to the 60th anniversary of the single-groove stereo disc, first launched by the small American indie label Audio Fidelity. As there was a lot of interest in that piece, John Seetoo interviewed Andrea Bass, daughter of Audio Fidelity founder Sid Frey. In issues to come, you’ll see more stories about Audio Fidelity and its artists. —Ed.]

Audio Fidelity’s name in the annals of recorded music was secured when the label released the first commercial long playing stereo record in 1957 of the Dukes of Dixieland with recordings of trains on the flip side.  Founded by entrepreneur Sid Frey, Audio Fidelity went on to amass an eclectic cross genre catalog of Bossa Nova, Hawaiian, Jazz, classical organ, marches, bagpipes and sound effects releases, among others.

Growing up in New York City as the daughter of “Mr. Stereo”, Andrea Bass has a unique perspective of what the Audio Fidelity era was like during the period in the 1950’s and 1960’s when her father, Sid Frey, was at the helm.

J.S.: Your father, Sid, was a pretty creative entrepreneur as well as an independent music recording industry maverick.  What family history circumstances do you think contributed to this individualistic streak, and why do you think it led to his affinity to music to eventually start Audio Fidelity?  Also, what contributions do you think your mother, Rosalind, made for the label?

A.B.: Those are some really good questions.  My dad did not have a background in music. He did go to Stuyvesant High School; back in those days, Stuyvesant had a – mechanical bent.  His father owned a series of bakeries, and he was a very innovative inventor.  He invented a host of labor saving devices for commercial bakeries.  I remember my grandmother saying, “The people from Silvercup (a bread brand in New York City whose facilities have now been converted to TV production studios) came in”.  So he was very creative.

And his mother, Molly, had an amazing coloratura opera voice, which was never commercialized.  She was born in Romania.  Her father brought her to the United States when she was 12 years old.  She went to live with her sister and raised her four boys.  She had some 3-4 years of public school education but never had an opportunity to pursue a career.  Very bright; she was a math whiz who could supposedly add up to twenty numbers in her head while working at the bakery.  So, the genetic stock was good. (laughs)  But no relatives that I can think of who were musicians.

That being said, my dad was in the Merchant Marine during World War II.  Part of his travels took him to Brazil, and that, I think, is where he became acquainted with Bossa Nova music.  And another part of his legacy is being the first to bring Bossa Nova musicians, artists and songwriters to the US in 1962 for what was a very famous concert at Carnegie Hall.  There were some technical problems with the concert, but it’s still considered to be a milestone in terms of the advent of Bossa Nova in the United States.

J.S.: And how about your mother, Rosalind?

A.B.: She was a counterweight to my dad.  She was…a very astute stock market investor.  When my father started to make money, he told her, “You go figure out how to invest it.”  She took all of the correspondence classes at the New York Institute of Finance.  She became very good at managing money, and she became a counterweight to him.  She was smart, quiet, and unassuming.  She was – life was a party, but she could also have a terrible temper.  A very volatile person.

JS.: Was Sid Frey’s pioneering work in commercializing stereo recordings something of historical significant awareness to the family at the time?  Was it considered just another technical product, like the train effects and other non musical recordings, since Audio Fidelity records wound up being used to demonstrate stereo systems in the industry’s infancy, or was there an awareness of a new market emerging, and why?

A.B: At the time?  Well I wasn’t really old enough at the time.  But amongst my family members, he was a hero.  I mean, it’s a testament to my mother and everyone else who supported my dad, that they stood by him and felt he had the wherewithal to start a company like this.  He may have had some entrepreneurial genes, but he had no money and no experience that I know of in the record business.

My grandmother told me that at one point, he was selling neon signs.  But then apparently, he connected with a guy who was distributing Israeli records, Jewish records for the Seymour Records series. Stuff like “Hanukkah Music Box” and “Passover Music”.  I think, somehow, my father was left holding the bag for Seymour Records.

And he then got the idea to build up the company, and he started with these “Audio Rarities”, which, as far as I know, was free content.  He had recordings of Laurence Olivier, recordings of Hitler making  speeches, things like how to teach your parakeet to talk…(laughs) It was really…eclectic!  And then, somewhere along the line, he got interested in bullfight music.  We had relatives in Mexico, so he had travelled to Mexico.  I don’t know the whole chronology of his records, but I remember that the bullfight music became a big deal, even before stereo.  There were pictures of him in various newspapers recording bullfight music in Mexico with the tape recorders and everything, but it was right in the middle of the grandstand of the bullfight ring!  So, he had the wherewithal to pull that off.

I don’t know how he got the stereo idea; maybe he had heard about what Emory Cook and Westrex had been doing, and somehow got it into his head that this was going to be the way to make his mark.

J.S:  So it was almost like he was constantly hustling to do all kinds of different things…

A.B.: He was a hustler!  And somehow, he came across stereo as an idea and how to pull it off.  And he pissed off all the other record labels.

One guy – Robert Angus?  Do you know this name?  He used to write for either Billboard or Cashbox,[Angus wrote for Billboard in the ‘50s, and later, High Fidelity—Ed.] and he said he was covering the Audio Engineering Society events or at least one event where my dad was introducing stereo.  And my dad literally was shouting other people off the stage!  (laughs)  He was never involved in politics but he had that kind of a personality.

J.S.: What was Audio Fidelity’s relationship with its artist roster like?  Any stories or incidents that you can recall which shows the way Sid Frey handled his artists?

A.B.: I’m in touch with some of the descendants of the artists or the artists themselves, at different points in time.  For example, the son of one of the guys from the Dukes of Dixieland.  He’s like the Keeper of the Flame.  I’ve talked to him.  And he said that the Dukes of Dixieland really didn’t trust my father!  I don’t know how he came up with this, because he offered them lots and lots of money…he wasn’t a big record label, but somehow he convinced them to go along with him.  There’s also guy who was also involved but is not alive anymore named Joe Delaney.  He was a writer about Las Vegas show business.  But he was also involved with managing the Dukes of Dixieland.

J.S.: Well, during that era, artists rarely knew anything about the business side of the music recording industry.  I mean, now we know the stories about Sam Phillips and Sun Records or Leonard Chess and Chess Records.  And there’s always two sides to the story.  In retrospect, yes, the artists get a lot more now than they did back then, but there was no real market yet at that time.  I mean, people like Sam Phillips and Sid Frey created the record market for independent label popular music. 

A.B.: From what I know, I don’t think my dad had a reputation for cheating his artists. On the Dukes of Dixieland website, there’s a picture of a check for $100,000 from Audio Fidelity Records – an enormous amount!

J.S.:  That was real money back in the 1950’s!

A.B.: Right.  But of the artists I’ve talked to – they all say, “I didn’t get my royalties.”  Like Oscar Brand, Manny Barty… these people are dead now.  I tell them, “I can’t do anything about that now.  My father died in 1968.”  But I’ve met some of these artists. I’ve met  Johnny Paleo, Louis Armstrong…the Bossa Nova people…they all came to our house for a party.  So I’d say the relationship was pretty good.  He had to have a lot of charm to convince these people to make records for him!  He was an unknown entity! He certainly wasn’t an established label like RCA! Some of these artists had choices as to whom to record for, and at least for a certain period of time, they chose to be with Audio Fidelity.

J.S.: Continuing on that topic – Lionel Hampton, The Dukes of Dixieland, Al Hirt, Lalo Schifrin, and also recordings of flamenco, bagpipes, pipe organ, harmonicas, marches, Hawaiian music, and Middle Eastern music, among other genres, are all part of the AF catalog releases during Sid Frey’s time at the helm. 

A.B.: I worked in consumer products for twenty years.  I know what it takes to launch a new product; there’s a lot involved.  My dad put out like 600 records in a period of 10 years. He had very few employees.  Diane Turman was the head of the PR team and she still is in the field.  We’re Facebook friends.  But they did a lot to get the records noticed.  My dad and she figured out that publicity was the way make his reputation.  And they got him tons of news clips!

J.S.: Did Sid or your mother cite any particular favorite records and explain why?

 A.B.: No particular favorites when he was alive.  Years later, something like Bossa Nova might come on the radio, and my mom would recall, “Oh, daddy recorded that.”  My father did have a huge, monster stereo system – there was an article about it in a hi-fi magazine – and he used to play it full blast.  We lived in an apartment building, and you couldn’t even hear the doorbell ring, it was so loud!  We had soundproofing in the apartment, but it was amazing he was never sued by the neighbors.  When he was just playing records in the house, he often played Bossa Nova.  Not even necessarily his records, but Bossa Nova in general.

J.S.: Why did Sid Frey sell the label in 1965, and what did he do subsequently after that?

A.B.: The company was taken over by a guy named Herman Gimpel in 1965.  There were some rumors…I think he realized that the times were changing and that he wasn’t going to make it in the pop music business.  He had artists like the Teemates that were sort of a Beatles type of band. But he saw where the industry was headed, and I think he saw that his time had passed.  The music business had some Mafia connections (in New York) and he didn’t want to stay in that circle.

Apart from music, he was also an avid coin collector.  Whenever he did something, he went all out and did it to the hilt.  He knew this guy named Hans Schulman , who, to this day, has a gigantic reputation in the world of numismatics.  Hans Schulman used to come to the apartment – this Mr. Big who sold coin collections to King Farouk of Egypt –  and he convinced my father that coin collection was “the hobby for kings”.

He got involved with publishing a catalogue of Chinese coins.  Remember, this was the Sixties – before Nixon went to China!  He started getting interested in coins while he was still at Audio Fidelity, but got more into it after he retired. I have no real interest in numismatics, but apparently some of them were quite valuable and it turned into as good a long term investment as any other collectible.

I also had a cousin who a techie guy and into CB radio.  This was before it got really big in the Seventies. My dad then got a CB radio for the house, and he got one for the car, and he’d be on that thing constantly – talking to strangers…he’d go to the ultimate!  I remember being in the car thinking, “Who the hell is he talking to?”  But that was another of his hobbies.

J.S.: What do you think is Sid Frey’s greatest achievement and legacy to music recording history, and how do you think he would like to be remembered?

A.B.: There would be no doubt about the fact that he loved being called, “Mr. Stereo.”  I don’t know if it he or the PR team that came up with that moniker.  And people from the Audio Engineering Society, as of 10-15 years ago, were still hostile towards my father.

J.S.: Hostile?

A.B.: I think they feel that he usurped the introduction of stereo – and he wasn’t the easiest person to get along with.  There was a presentation that went into the history of stereo with German tape, and the Emory Cook recordings, and they really downplayed my father’s contributions to the industry.  There was also a presentation on the history of recorded sound, and they didn’t even include him!

At one point, I got involved in the AES Historical Society, and became friendly with (the late) Irv Joel, who was a top engineer at Capitol Records.  Anyway, he did the research about my dad and gave a very nice segment about Audio Fidelity.  But other people were quick to credit Emory Cook for also selling records. It’s kind of like (the debate about) Tesla and Edison. Tesla made many contributions, but he didn’t get the credit, while Edison became the (commercial) kingpin of the industry.

J.S.: As an artist in your own right, how do you think your experience growing up in a music and business environment in NYC has informed your choices of profession?

A.B.: I became an artist after working in marketing for quite a number of years.  My family always encouraged all kinds of creative activities. My mother was an oil painter.  My sister and I took piano lessons, ballet, went to  museums.  After deciding to really get into art and studying art history, I now have several mentors in the City College Arts Department that have encouraged my work.

One thing I did learn, and it is somewhat related thematically, is the history of the Barbie doll.  Barbie was a very innovative introduction to the American landscape.  Before Barbie, all dolls were baby dolls, so girls could pretend to be mothers. This unbelievable entrepreneur, Ruth Handler, was the president of Mattel and created the Barbie doll.  In the face of huge opposition, she put out Barbie in the 1950s and it became the best selling toy in the world.  Barbie could change her clothes and be a stewardess, an astronaut – this was quite an expansion of the toy industry. It turns out that Ruth was travelling in Europe and got the idea of how the Barbie doll should look because of dolls that were made from a character in a German semi pornographic comic strip.  Ruth Handler saw something there that could be modified and marketed on a big scale, just like my dad with stereo.