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We are a group of music lovers whose lives have been greatly enriched
by classical music and FanFaire is our way of sharing with the
world the many joys it has given us through the years.
FanFaire is everything that the words FAN, FAIR(E), and FANFARE
connote. FanFaire is a creation of fans of opera and classical
music, thus it is a "fan-zine", but one devoted to singing the
praises not of one artist alone but of many. FanFaire is about
a "fair" that never ends - it is about the concerts and the
operas and the music festivals we have attended in the past and will continue
to attend in the future, and it is about the music we listen to at home
- our way of having a truly good time, rather like going to the fair!
FanFaire is also about being fair - being only self-taught in
music appreciation we will share with you as best we can the music and
the performances we've most enjoyed; being trained in neither musicology
nor music criticism we will pretend to be neither theorists nor critics
and thus will make no attempt at demolishing artistic reputations. FanFaire
is likewise a play on the the Middle English "faire", an allusion
to things old or classic or timeless, a device to remind us that music
created hundreds of years ago is as beautiful and satisfying now as it
was in its day. (Not that classical music is what some people call "grandparents'
music" - indeed in future issues, we shall feature classical music
artists modern in outlook and very much in the prime of their youth.)
And finally, FanFaire is about fanfare, as in "a flourish
of trumpets," - music, which for us is the most enjoyable if not
the loftiest art, is always a form of celebration.
In our premiere issue, we celebrated the
music of Richard Wagner, specifically the "Ring Cycle", the
artistry of one of its foremost interpreters - the German soprano Hildegard
Behrens, and the Metropolitan Opera's acclaimed production staged in the
spring of 1997. Each subsequent contains as much textual information as
we feel the "cyber-reader" can take (technological advances
notwithstanding, the monitor screen, being more a medium for casual rather
than serious reading, remains a poor substitute for curling up in bed
with a good book); for the more deeply interested, "Suggested Reading"
lists are occasionally offered. Whenever the requisite permission is granted,
brief sound clips of the music (written or performed by our featured artists)
are included and at times downloadable in the hope that doing so would
entice the reader to buy the CD or attend a performance and/or listen
to the whole work and thereby deepen his/her interest in classical music
- which after all is best appreciated by listening to than by reading
about it.
If those "thoroughly washed" in
opera and classical music do not derive the greatest pleasure from this
web-zine, we won't mind. It is sufficient that they give even tacit approval
to this attempt by the "moderately washed" to acquaint the "unwashed"
with the many pleasures of classical music. Over the past years, critics
and enthusiasts alike have decried what they perceive to be the "graying"
of classical music, if not its sad decline. Classical music in all its
forms is a universal treasure and those of us whose lives have been enriched
by it must do all we can to keep it alive. By launching FanFaire
in cyberspace, we hope to do our bit to ensure that it endures well into
the millennium. |
