This is the truth. I wasn’t looking around for my CD (I mean, I do that sometimes, but not this time), I was looking for an Ethel Smyth recording, really I was, on my web resource of first resort, ArkivMusic, which I’m glad I have bookmarked because I’m always misspelling it as ArkivMusik, shouldn’t it be ArkivMusik, if you’re going to go to all that trouble of having the k and the iv? Well, on the way to Smyth (and I always go through Arkiv’s fun narrowing-by-letter-then-letters string instead of typing in the search box, whether I know the spelling or not, and after all I always want to put an e after Smyth), who is a fine composer, when I got to Sm I thought I’d take a detour to see if a Smith Vespers was in the house. Last time I had checked—a year ago?— it wasn’t.
And then there it was. Hoo-wee, went my heart.
Even though I have the Gramophone quote here, it seems so much more real in ArkivMusik, I mean ArkivMusic. Seeing it there, the album cover, the audio samples, my name spelled right, the buttons that everyone else has, it seems like now it’ll never be lost. It’s been on Amazon and everywhere else since the release, so I’m being silly, but seeing it on my favorite CD resource was a little thrill, I’ll admit.
I found Dame Ethel, too. Love that ArkivMusic.