Other Interests

Music Logo On a Saturday afternoon in 1972 I went to a chamber music concert in a large auditorium. The next morning having sunday brunch with friends I told them I was unhappy with large auditoria as a venue for chamber music. This is music written to be heard by a small audience played in a medimum sized room, economics drives it into a large auditorium. My friends agreed, but everyone felt nothing could be done about it. I suggested that we hire a string quartet and have a concert in one of our living rooms. Everyone thought that simply impossible. I was not so sure.

The next day I called the California Institute of the Arts in Pomona and asked for someone from the Sequoia Quartet. As it happens, Robert Martin, the cellist from the Quartet was walking through the Music Department office at the time I called. We talked, and he told me they charged $5000 per performance. I said that for a small group of 30 that was just too expensive the most we could afford was around $800. He said he would talk it over with the rest of the group. The next day he said we had a deal, but they wanted to choose what they would play, that way they could use us as `a dress rehersal' for a future concert.

That year, I organized three more concerts and the concept of Tigertail Associates was born. In future years more concerts were added. Tigertail Associates eventually became a California non-profit organization, officially listed as a US 501c(3) charity. This meant that contributions to the group were tax deductable. For sixteen years I organized a concert series every year. Only one year did we suffer a major loss of income, that was a year I decided that we should charge for individual concerts rather than having yearly donation. I never tried that again.

Every year until they disbanded the Sequoia String Quartet played for us, they became our resident quartet. We had many local groups and individuals play among them: the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the New Music Group of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. And many groups and individuals from farther away: The Nielson Quartet from Denmark, Richard Goode from New York, and one of the rare live appearences of Flim and the BBs, a jazz synthesis group.

Tigertail Associates is dedicated to promoting the arts and music, to reasearch technology applications to the arts, and explore technology to teach the arts and humanities. Several research projects were undertaken some with the sponsorship of major companies. One project built computer programs to help primary school children learn basic art concepts of color mixing, color matching, and perspective. This was sponsored by the Xerox Corporation and was done in the UCLA Education Department's Experimental Primary School.

In 1992 I wrote a 250 page

. I have yet to find a publisher for this book which is designed just like a travel guide, not as something to read through but to pick up areas of interest and read about them. That is the book falls somewhere between an encyclopedia of music and a introductory textbook.

Recently I organized a weekly opera evening in Auckland, where students (and staff) come to my house on Thursday evenings to watch laserdisks of opera on TV. This is in its second year.

I have a variety of other interests including creative writing, astronomy, history, economics, and recreational mathematics.