Colony Music is closing its doors and with it goes a door to my heart.
My first purchase at Colony Music was G. Schirmers 24 Italian Art Songs and Arias. I was sixteen-years old and studying opera at the time and over the next ten years worked my way through the entire book which is presently in my periphery tucked underneath my piano, bound together with affection and Scotch tape.
I bought the scores for La Traviata, Rigoletto, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, Tosca, I Pagliacci, Madama Butterfly, and Il Trovatore at Colony.
I tried my hand at musicals for a while, and bought hundreds of songs for auditions there after that. But as I couldn't dance very well, I never got really far at the dozen or so Broadway auditions I faked my way through. I still liked to sing anyway, and would browse the stacks at Colony just for the fun of it all, for the simpler joy of singing in an empty staircase or a closed rehearsal room.
A few years ago, I lost the hearing in my right ear. I couldn't hear myself very well any longer. I sensed I was going wildly off key. The simpler joy was sadly slightly tarnished.
So one day, I picked up a primer on the piano at Colony. My Mom had bought me a keyboard for Christmas and I taught myself some scales. More books followed and I eventually splurged on a Korg electronic piano with weighted keys. Whenever I had a hard day, I would treat myself with a trip to Colony, a three minute walk as it happens, and buy some music, my favorites like Burt Bacharach, or The Beatles, or The Complete Rogers and Hart, or something more challenging like Beethoven's Für Elise. I am not good by any measure, in any measure. At all.
But it is my happiest pass-time, buying music and making music.
I will miss Colony and Colony in particular. It had absolutely no pretense. It was a ratty, ramshackle, twisted, crowded, crazy affair. The owners looked as though they stepped out of an episode of Hoarders. They very well may have. The entire history of music seemed crowded into that corner of 49th Street. There was little rhyme or reason or rhythm to the stacks. But that was its great success. You could take your time in Colony and just look and listen and dig and make stunningly great finds. Every visit was a treasure hunt and the prize was the greatest music ever written.
You didn't have to be a star to shop in Colony. Better put, every one was a star, every one whoever allowed music to enter into their heart was a great gleaming star in Colony and the camaraderie in the cramped aisles was the camaraderie of a galaxy: We all belong here and celebrate our own particular starshine in the collected glory of all of yours. We want the best for and from each other. Competition is as pointless as a competition of constellations.
These kinds of places are disappearing all around us. And I sound old when I protest that I don't approve. But listen to your elders: Some things are worth keeping around because they make us feel better about what we can do, about what we might do, about what we dare do.
