RIP Art Dudley Requiem

New York Diary (20-12) R.I.P. Art Dudley

Stereophile has announced on their website the passing of Art Dudley (here). Our writer mrgoodsound alerted me to this, and mentioned that for many (including 24 year old him) he remained the most worthwhile writer of that magazine. I cannot agree more. Any regular reader of this blog who still read a trade magazine will likely to have read a lot of the stuff he wrote.

Art Dudley started writing for Stereophile in 2003, and I have read everyone of his columns. But my recognition of his name was before that. Although I was not a subscriber, occasionally I'd get to read a bit of his Listener magazine though others. The decade span of that magazine coincided with my own journey from vintage gears to SE amps and horns.

One can say there was a large group of people who grew up together. No two individuals can have the same preferences, but there was enough over-lapping in interests to make one feel there was a community. As to what those interests were, here is a snippet from the worthwhile magazine Enjoy the Music, in a 2002 interview with Art Dudley:


S.R.: The direction of the magazine: Who really chose what would be reviewed and other subjects covered?

A.D.: It was a group effort, but I had final say — meaning, essentially, I had to be enthusiastic about a musical artist or a product or even a genre of products before Listener would devote any space to it. So we wound up with a mag that paid attention to affordable integrated amplifiers, single-ended triode amplifiers, efficient loudspeakers, cheap tweaks, high-quality turntables and tonearms... and yet which virtually ignored expensive digital separates, ultra-high-power amplifiers, $1,000 AC cords, and those sorts of things. I really wasn't interested in the things I wasn't really interested in, if you see what I mean.

There, the commonality. Although people like me went much further than Art Dudley into esoteric vintage stuff and horns, and much further away from the mainstream, and much more drastic in opinions, in my mind Art Dudley (and Stereophile) are remarkable for several reasons:

• Command of Language and Sensibility Art Dudley was not always the easiest to read nor to follow, but he was a natural and master writer (only Herb Reichert, an artist, can come close sometimes) who often inter-weaved his own world view and music preference into his writing, creating almost flights of fantasy. It is a personal style, with its own cadence that is impossible to emulate. Were we as good writers!

• Audio Vocabulary Art Dudley always created his own language, including simple words like touch and force, but he made them his own, and I sometimes find myself unconsciously emulating. This made most other audio writers read like artificial intelligence. Take TAS' Executive Editor, Jonathan Valin, who is a real life published writer, yet I could never finish his articles, so boring in the usual audiophile ways. The problem is, a writer like JV is always conscious of his audiophile credentials, or "reputations", whereas someone like AD is always into his feelings, a great divide only Moses can part.

• Audacity Given his determination to not upend his home life, his placement of loudspeakers is, by his own admission, not ideal. More than that, his use of Altec Valencia, not an easy loudspeaker to get right, and certainly not as suitable for every type of music, surely raised eyebrows (including mine). I'd guess the same for his vintage audio sympathies. But he made his readers read on his own terms and to believe in him.

• Sense Unlike some of his peers who also started by preaching non-mainstream audio, and partly because of stereophile policy, Art Dudley was quite sensible, even conservative, about what he would review and generally refused solicitations from garage operations and fly by night stuff that are so mythologized in numerous forums. He even wrote about this. In contrast, witness Jeff Day, who had been at this game for a long time and who now engages in a lot of wayward, non-basic, esoteric DIY tweaks, and to me almost everything he writes on Tannoy is wrong. Also, take 6moons, it started OK, but now reviews all kinds of unworthy stuff. Fame changes people, but not Art Dudley.

• As Reviewer Unlike in his column, AD still had to review equipment but even when he chose more mainstream equipment he chose well. Luxman, Jadis, these tube stuff are not at all on my trajectory these days, but I do think someone just into tube stuff will find these reviews useful. Those reviews are a lot more interesting than what most of what the other reviewers review.

• Credit to John Atkinson JA is to be respected for having eyed Art Dudley for the longest time. Given his technical bent and measurements, the fact that he hired Dudley and Reichert testifies to his integrity as an impartial editor, who appreciates different points of  view. May that tradition continue. 

Basic Repertoire I'd like to include a video for the concept of RIP, our tribute, not only to AD, but to all the Frontline Workers who have sacrificed their lives for the world. But it is easier said than done. A proper Requiem has many movements and one has to work the interlocking elements for the effect to take place. This feature of this blog has recently featured mostly slow movements, understandable given our current world crisis. So I shall instead continue with an adagietto, from Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony. This, the fourth in a five-movement work, actually is an anomaly when taken on its own. It is the calm before the storm (in the 5th movement) and the preceding movements are tumultuous too! Mahler originally intended it as a declaration of love for his new wife, Alma. But that doesn't prevent it from being interpreted in other ways. Some conductors take it relatively fast, including Bruno Walter, who had first-hand experience of Mahler conducting, and this is the version I chose, for its concision. This piece of music was made famous by Luciano Visconti's film Death in Venice, based on the Thomas Mann novel (Benjamin Britten also wrote an opera on this). In that film, the music comes over as much more morose when coupled to the image. Mind you, many conductors take it much more slowly (some 5 minutes longer than this one). You may want to investigate other versions should you like the music. For me, there is a tender, maybe even lamenting, feeling to the music, but sometimes less is more.

For the next video, I hesitated about it. AD was a Catholic, but he was also an inquisitive fellow who followed his own path and, shall I say, not without doubt (who is not?). As regular readers know, I have been listening a lot to Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call. It is trance-like and I don't mind listening to it repeatedly. Here is Idiot Prayer, a track that I particularly take to. Mind you, lest you think too much, the idiot is me, but I'd think AD would approve of this track, especially with its Country and Bluegrass Elements.