Da capo. . .

Your eyes do not deceive you, nor has the Quarterly entered into a time warp. For the past seven years, beginning with volume 14, number 1 (autumn 1997), this space has been called "Quarter Notes." The notes appearing each time under that designation were those of the three opening measures of the first act of Don Giovanni, Leporello's "Notte e giorno faticar." The late Tom—E(dward) Thomas—Glasow did indeed "labor night and day" for our benefit, and the wonderful, multilayered play on words and rhythm, the involvement of his beloved Mozart, and the covert reference to himself as the humble but feisty servant constitute pure Glasovian wit: subtle and requiring a bit of thought to mine all the meaning out of it. The circumstances that have conspired to require that I take this space again, temporarily, are bad enough; nothing could persuade me to intrude in it under Tom's own title.¹ That, like the number on a well-loved athlete's jersey, we have now retired.

The editorial column in this journal has always been a supremely personal space, and the four of us who have held the position that entitled us to it—for a finite period—tailored it to individual aesthetic preferences and senses of responsibility and mission. Founding editor Irene Sloan, the pioneer in everything, called it, simply and eloquently, "Work." Bill Ashbrook, conjuring the ambience of a bygone journalistic era, submitted his remarks "From under a Green Eyeshade." I preferred editorial bookends and so, cheating just a bit on the absolutely literal musical meaning and significance of the terms, wrote at length in "Da capo . . ." at the beginning of each issue, then did a much shorter summation in ". . . al fine" at the back. That format seemed an especially appropriate one-time-only revival because it allows us both to begin and to end this issue with tributes to Tom.

Paying tribute: what a delicate and important matter that is. The day that Zinka Milanov died, I sat at the desk in her Upper West Side Manhattan living room, next to her grieving widower, fielding calls from obituary writers worldwide,

Figure 1.

Edward Thomas Glasow (1947-2004). (Courtesy of Harry Erbland.)

and learned that almost all the major American, British, and continental European newspapers had lengthy "Milanov Dies" write-ups already on file. "Her age," the voices at the other end of the line would say by way of explanation—the great soprano was eighty-three at the time of her death—"We knew we had to be ready at any time." They had all been prepared, it turned out, since the time she was about seventy, and all that remained was for each article to be updated regarding the activities of the last decade of her life and the details of her passing. At the point I realized I would have to "be ready" to write in the past tense about Tom, I could not evoke from any quarter of my being the volition to get a head start on the task in order to make it easier on myself later. On the contrary, movement went in the opposite direction, into denial and the desire not to set anything down on paper. My emotional investment was instead in the unlikely but devoutly hoped-for off-chance that a miracle would occur and no memorial essay would yet be necessary for a very long time.

The miracles of recovery and longevity were not those granted, but the life of Tom Glasow, and particularly its final two years, held something of the miraculous. From the point of view of those reading these lines, a number of months have now passed since we first conveyed news of the loss our journal and all its contributors and friends suffered on 15 June 2004. That announcement itself did not follow close on the event, the nature of a quarterly publication's schedule being what it is. Despite the month and day on which these words enter your homes, they are actually being written very shortly after the death...