Michael Vaillancourt

My interest in music started very early, when I began to take notice of my father’s extensive collection of big band records. This lead me to the trumpet in school bands and area youth orchestras. By high school I discovered to my surprise that there existed an enormous amount of music written a hundred or more years ago that was far more exciting than what my friends listened to on the radio—so exciting that I decided that I wanted to spend my life studying it and listening to it. Thus came about my subsequent orientation toward music history at the University of Connecticut and the University of Vienna, with my eventually receiving a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Illinois. I have since published numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, concentrating on two main areas: 19th-century Central Europe (particularly Brahms), and early twentieth-century Britain (particularly Vaughan Williams).

All the while my research time has had to compete with my record collecting and listening time, with the latter frequently triumphant. Although I have always had an interest in a wide range of recordings, my mainstays have been orchestral and chamber music, with particular emphasis in recent years on historical recordings. The fact that I owned a used bookstore that also sold used classical CDs didn’t hurt the size of my collection—I often had to restrain myself (with only partial success) from poaching huge swaths of our stock for my own collection.

I still live in Champaign, IL with my wife, Julia, a retired professor of English literature, two cats (one of whom is partial to Brahms and Bruckner symphonies—lucky for her, since she has to listen to them so often), 6,000 CDs, and a rather huge garden. Having read Fanfare more or less regularly since its inception, I am thrilled and still a little shocked to be an actual reviewer. If my reviews can help kindle enthusiasm in some readers, all to the good. Because that is what matters—keeping alive this extraordinary music and its traditions now and in the future.