By the early months of 1973 I felt ready for a radical change of professional direction. There were both negative and positive reasons for this.

On the negative side, having in nearly six years reviewed probably well over two thousand performances, I had begun to find the job too easy. It was not that I was jaded by the sheer bulk of the activity I was reviewing: I had been able to maintain freshness by setting aside two weeks every year for a vacation on which listening to music was firmly proscribed. Friends I visited on those trips were no doubt puzzled, or even shocked, when they asked what I would like to listen to and I firmly replied, “Nothing!” (I have in any case never been able to talk to people with any degree of concentration when music is on the radio or the record player), and equally puzzled when I no less firmly rejected any suggestion of attendance at a genuinely interesting concert. But the payoff would come when I returned to Chicago and entered Orchestra Hall, and the orchestra began to tune up, and my immediate reaction was: “Oh, that's so beautiful!”

No, I still loved listening to music. But my daily routine had reached a point where I could go to a concert, return to the Chicago Daily News offices, and write a review (a perfectly adequate review—I am not indulging here in false modesty) without actually thinking, and I had begun to feel that this was bad for the musicians, and for music, and for me.

The more positive reason for such a move was simply a feeling that it was all very well to pontificate about musicians’ virtues and vices from a safe seat on the sidelines, but that it would be a healthy and fruitful step to put my own head for once on the chopping block. It's true that I had done this in a small way by my sorties into choral singing and performing as a narrator, as well as by virtue of the text I had written to be performed in Wilfred Josephs's Death of a Young Man song cycle.