Kapilow on Nabokov, Nabokov on Nabokov

Rob Kapilow had a nice chat with Karen Campbell the other day, the results of which are in today's Boston Globe Calendar. The Q&A style write-up is an excellent, succinct overview of what Rob has been doing in Boston for, well, the last ten years (Happy Anniversary, Rob!) and elsewhere for longer. Here is Rob's take on what he's doing with Family Musik and What Makes It Great?:

"One of my real goals is that in the end, they hear the music differently. Nabokov wrote that a good reader is someone who writes in the margins, who folds down pages, who underlines, who has a conversation with the book. I’m trying to encourage active conversations with music."
Full text of the interview.

Something about this reference to Vladimir Nabokov triggered a memory - hadn't I read V.N. somewhere saying something about his own relationship to music? Well, rather than change buses and go straight to the library, I waited until I could get to a computer and click my way to the answer. And with almost no effort on my part, here is the sentiment I remembered, from a book of Playboy Magazine interviews of all things (as I recall, the Miles Davis and Ray Charles interviews in this same volume are terrific, too). The interview took place in 1964, here's V.N.:

"I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I attend a concert -- which happens  about once in five years --  I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for  more than a few  minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, these take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians. My knowledge of music is very slight; and I have a special reason for finding my ignorance and inability so sad, so unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family -- my own son. His great gifts, the rare beauty of his bass, and the promise of a splendid career -- all this affects me deeply, and I feel a fool during a technical conversation among musicians. I am perfectly aware of the many parallels  between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure, but what
can I do if ear and brain refuse to cooperate?"

Boy, Rob sure knows where to go for his analogies. It seems V.N. (that's him in the photo above, with friend) could have really used Rob's help. Lucky for any of you that might feel the same way, you have access to Rob. In fact, he will be here this weekend, at the Tsai Center with Crossing the Divide (part of Family Musik) and again on June 2 with a program on the songs of Stephen Sondheim (part of What Makes It Great?).