Mark Gabrish Conlan

I’ve owned record-playing equipment of one form or another since the age of four, when my mother and stepfather gave me a small phonograph for my birthday, along with a few old 78rpm records. Though I’ve never studied music professionally, I’ve been an avid listener all my life. My favorite types of music are classical and jazz, courtesy of my mother, who always seemed to have one or the other playing in the house as I was growing up. I love just about any kind of music—classical, jazz, blues, rock, country and the so-called “Great American Songbook”—as long as it has emotional sincerity and touches my heart. My favorite composer is Wagner, but I also love (in chronological order) J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bellini, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Verdi, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Reger, Puccini, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. I’ve also come to like 20th-century British church composers, especially Herbert Howells and Healey Willan, whose music seems to ignore the tonality vs. atonality debate that roiled the classical-music world in the 20th century.

I was born in San Francisco, California and can remember as a child going to symphony concerts as part of a school program, by which means we were invited free to matinées and sat in the balcony of the War Memorial Opera House, where the San Francisco Symphony used to perform. I have lived in San Diego, California since 1980 and currently reside in a two-bedroom apartment with my partner of 29 years and my husband of 16, Charles Nelson, who periodically expresses his frustration at the sheer number of CDs, LPs, DVDs, and books I’ve accumulated.