Alan Rich was born in Boston in 1924 and studied at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked as a music critic on a wide variety of publications, including The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and New York magazine. He is currently the music critic for Newsweek. He is the author of Careers and Opportunities in Music, Music: Mirror of the Arts, and The Lincoln Center Story. He lives in Los Angeles.
Funny you should ask.
In 1978 I laughed out loud at a job offer from Los Angeles. I was at the time music critic at New York magazine, a job that offered comfort and identity in, I thought, the only city in America for anyone involved in serious music. Leave that behind for the glitzy beguilements of some outpost in a well-known cultural desert? Ha-ha.
A year later I was happily employed in Los Angeles. I had, in the interim, taken a couple of trips West and learned a thing or two about California that I’d somehow missed before, most of all that it had become a state of great and admirable artistic growth: important resident leaders for its symphony orchestras, important spirits making new music, important progressive educational ventures to guide the growth of young performers and composers. I began to hear a few false overtones in the folk tunes sung by the old New York grannies, the songs about outpost and
