David DeBoor Canfield

My father, a professional musician and music educator, gave me my first records when I was about five. This was long enough ago (c.1955) that they were 78s (children's records retained that speed longer in the U.S. than did "grown-up" records). I can remember being fascinated by such gems as Sparky and His Magic Baton and Aladdin and His Magic Lamp (set to the music of Sheherazade, of course). When I was slightly older, I graduated to LPs and longer works without any narrative to help me through the music. This group of records included Milstein's Capitol recording of the Mendelssohn and Bruch concerti, a Scherchen Westminster LP containing Ravel's Bolero, and several others. I was still young enough to wonder how the man who narrated my recording of Peter and the Wolf could become a woman, not realizing until some years later that I must have accidentally played it that time at 45 rpm on my three-speed player.

I didn't purchase a record for myself until I was in high school--an LP of encores by Heifetz (my interest was piqued by the fact that he was famous, and the violin was my primary instrument). My collection did not begin in earnest, however, until I was in college and discovered that I could use excess scholarship funds in the college bookstore, which carried a modest selection of budget LPs. There, I purchased such goodies as the Bruckner Ninth with Schuricht on Seraphim, Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten on London Stereo Treasury, and so forth. I began to devour all the repertory that my modest budget as a student would allow.

It was only when I came to graduate studies at Indiana University that I began to discover the gems that could be found in used record stores. I can still remember my eyes being opened to exotic composers of whom I had never heard by happening across a stash of Belgian Culturas and Alphas at the Wuxtry Records in Atlanta. I began to realize that there was an incredible spectrum of music outside of the standard repertory about which I knew absolutely nothing. My musical curiosity led me to buy any record that contained a piece of music that I had never heard before.

However, my collection remained relatively modest in size--a few thousand records--until I began to issue my Ars Antiqua record lists in 1978. At first, this was merely a way to meet other collectors and fill in some gaps in my own collection (with my very first list of record offerings, I inserted a want list), and not intended to be my livelihood. It so happened that I was getting into this business at an opportune time, and it was only a couple of years before I went into the record business full time, giving up my music library position at Indiana University (by then having obtained a doctorate in music composition). Over the quarter century that I was the largest collectors' classical LP dealer on the planet, I looked through literally millions of records, having first pick at anything I came across. This allowed me to build up a unique library, devoted to as many pieces of music in all styles and genres as I could find. By the time I sold the collection to the Library of Congress, I estimate that I had collected somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 different pieces of classical music, most of which I listened to at one point or the other.