Three short bulletins on “Opera as Opera”: 1) Owing to a logjam at the printer, the shipping date for the second printing has been postponed to December 4. My apologies for the delay, but that’s still in good time for Christmas. The first printing’s quick sale blindsided my most optimistic calculations. 

2) The distribution center has “discovered” a very few copies of the first printing still in stock, so if you hurry you may be able to get an order filled without the irksome wait.

3) The November issue of Opera brings us another wonderful, substantial review of the book, this one by Stephen Hastings, a critic of high standing and long experience. Give it a look. To the subject of the day: 

My high school years were spent at a traditional New England prep school, a little world unto itself. The ways of that world were already changing—the study of Latin or Greek, for instance, had just been nudged from required-course status to that of recommended language option. But the curriculum was still of pre-Ivy League classical design, and its Protestant evangelical origins (the school was founded by one of the late 19th century’s revivalist stars, D. L. Moody) were still alive as matters of daily practice. Boys and girls had dedicated campuses, with the Connecticut River and a few extra miles between them. The school had an immense dining hall, plausibly reputed to be the largest unsupported indoor space in the Northeast. The noonday meal was Announcement Time. A chime would be struck, the hall would fall silent, and a designated student or faculty spokesman would step forward on a platform with the news of the day: extracurricular club meeting times, school sports team results, social event schedules, academic competition results (the Debating Forum, the Declamation Contest, The Time Current Events Contest, etc.), the occasional disciplinary crackdown. And these announcements, of course, were launched into the room from 16- and 17-year-old throats in unassisted oratorical tone, as was all such speech, whether in the classroom, the chapel, the assembly hall, or auditorium.

A few years ago, I returned to the campus for my class’s 60th reunion. Strolling one of the paths overlooking the City on a Hill greensward, I ran into a classmate who asked what I’d planned for the day’s 5:00 p.m. time slot. When I answered in the neutral, he urged me to attend a concert by the current a cappella group. “They’re really good!”, he said. So at the appointed hour, my wife and I made our way down the hill to the new performing arts building. It stood roughly in place of the two former main classroom buildings, red-brick piles from the time of the school’s founding, one a sciences lab, the other called (à propos) Recitation Hall. In my student days, “a cappella” meant a select group of guys with nice voices and good intonation within the choir, ready for an unaccompanied early church-music selection or the occasional solo turn in an anthem. For these kids, though, it meant close harmony in selections drawn mostly from pop and folk genres. They sang with pleasing tone, good balance, and an ingenuous sincerity. They stayed on pitch.Their presentation was impeccably democratic: at the end of each selection, a different member of the group would announce the next one. Everyone got a turn.