i# STEAL THIS CD

In my day-job, clerking in the music department of a large, chain bookstore, it is often my duty to flip, compact disc by compact disc, through our inventory, in search of the small magnetic stickers the company affixes to the recordings as theft preventers. Found cut from the packaging cellophane and wadded between disks, they are the telltale sign of an attempt to steal the disk from which they came. They are a record (evidence, if you will) of the musical tastes of the larcenously-inclined segment of our population.

Most are stickers for the music of popular rap music acts, like Eminem or The Black-Eyed Peas. Perhaps, then, there is some degree of truth to the reputation such music enjoys as a breeder of anger, hatred, gangsterism, theft, the smacking up of ’ho’s and the busting of caps.

Perhaps. But today, wadded up and tucked out of the way somewhere in the Rachmaninoff section, I found the security sticker for Morton Feldman’s ‘Patterns in a Chromatic Field’ for cello and piano.

I’m not making this up.

Certainly, it is more than possible that the evident theft of one one of the most anemic, listless pieces of music of all time, by one of the most emphatically un-hip composers of all time could have been a mere mistake; a crime of opportunity committed by the ignorant. Won’t the would-be criminal be surprised to hear the results of the theft?–

–just… one… note… at a… time.

But–and perhaps I’m being sentimental–I prefer to think that someone walked into that store with one thing on their mind: “I’m gonna snag me some super-concentrated, post-expressionist uber-modernism.”

And as much as I by-and-large can’t stand more than five minutes of Feldman’s music at a time, it does my heart good to think someone could be willing to go to that length to listen to it. Because it means someone still cares about serious music.

If no one riots at premiers anymore, as they famously did in the earliest part of the 20th century, perhaps they can at least steal Morton Feldman CDs.

It’s a start, at any rate.

 Evans Winner
 Seattle, Washington
 December, 2005