Dear Ray,

Thank you for your letter. Since we're using first names, you have a choice:
I was called Ernst Jochen in memory of my father's brother Ernst Joachim Meyer
who fought in the German Army in World War I, and was killed in battle in
November 1914. For my parents and my sister I was Jochen; my class- and playmates
in the Southwest Virginia backwoods where I lived from age 9 to 15, couldn't
pronounce the rough "ch" and called me variously Yokum or Yohan; after I escaped 
from Virginia and enrolled in Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia for my 
senior year, the teachers thought I needed an English name to make me sociable
and called me "John";the college registrar discovered my first name was "Ernst" 
and reduced Jochen to "J." and since then I've masqueraded through uncounted 
layers of bureaucracy as "Ernst J." My daughter-in-law and my grandchildren, 
Nathaniel included, call me "Yoyo". Take your pick: Ernst, Jochen, Yokum, Yohan,
John, or Yoyo.

You ask about how we managed in Germany. I was born in 1930. My father was
taken to Buchenwald after Kristallnacht (Nov 9, 1938) and was released two or 
three weeks later on condition he leave Germany immediately. My mother, my sister
and I accompanied him to the steamship in Bremerhaven on Dec 7, 1938; and 
followed him to New York three and a half months later, on March 23, 1939.
In Germany, my father was a successful physician, a general practitioner,
and we lived a life of upper middle class luxury until July 1938, when his
medical license was revoked. I can provide such details of our lives in
Germany and in America as interest you when we sit down to talk.

The history of music is a subject of endless fascination for me, perhaps
because I understand both music and history so poorly. Some defect in my ear 
or in my brain blocks my affection for and understanding of much, most, or
all music written after 1900. The term "history of music" puzzles me as 
inherently contradictory. Because music is the eternal present, die ewige
Gegenwart, - whenever Nathaniel lifts his baton a new epoch of time begins,
a reality of experience, an eternity which at the end of the piece is ruthlessly
destroyed and buried by the applause. Whereas the present (re)created by the
music is inescapable, the history - of music or of anything else - is unreal,
History is the story of death and of the dead. The presumption of reviving
the past and "making it come alive" is a dubious enterprise. Poetry - the
exercise of language as virtual reality - is a different path.

Dear Ray! The foregoing comments document that I have, admittedly with glee 
and abandon, jumped off the deep end, somewhat beyond the range of sanity.
But if you wish to have a talk and a cup of tea with me nonetheless, I
shall be happy to open the door for you.

Best wishes,
Jochen