Scriabin's music embraces the past and the future, formality and freedom. Its large range of expression - anger, fear, heroism, darkness, mystery, evil, light, fire, flight, intoxication, languor, love, sex, ecstasy - is the very connective tissue of his life and thought. His remarkable harmonic scheme is like a burgeoning new language but with few cognates. His works are experiences of an inexhaustible range of color, from the most delicate nuance to rich multi-voiced textures, and of (his favorite word) "sensations."

      -Donald Garvelmann

Don was a friend of mine since 1991, when he introduced himself to me after a concert which included a couple of pieces by the British composer Kaikhosru Sorabji. I recognized Garvelmann's name as the author of several program notes for classical piano records and CDs, and I also knew him as the author of the Sorabji entry in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the author of an introduction to a book of essays and musical criticism by Sorabji.

Don and I became fast friends and my life was made richer by the countless hours we spent chatting on the phone and at restaurants about piano music and pianists and about his personal window into the lives and personalities of dozens if not hundreds of concert pianists and composers old and young from around the world. We talked about his life in New York (he was working in the Empire State Building the day an airplane crashed into it) and about my life here, conscientiously comparing and contrasting and he all the while trying to make a bigger deal out of my life than about his.

Listening to Don talk about the great piano recitals of the 1960s and 1970s (he saw all the great pianists from Horowitz to Helps to Saperton to you name it) was my little window into a generation of classical music that was nothing like the present. He was, as he occasionally reminded me, a member of the "New York Piano Mafia" that went to all the big concerts during those golden days. His writing about the piano music of Scriabin, Sorabji, Goetz and others was exciting.

I quickly learned to respect his opinions about pianists and his suggestions about interesting composers. During the last 12 months I learned to simply follow his suggestions without question. His sensitivity to genuine originality and genius was exquisitely tuned, and his enthusiasm for the world of piano music was childlike in its purity but authoritative in its completeness. His personality was charming and ingratiating, and it is hard to imagine a more pleasant gentleman.

Don was known among his peers for his personal friendship with Sorabji, as well as for his pioneering advocacy of Sorabji's music before it attracted the interest of even that small cadre of pianophile cognoscenti who passionately seek out the world's most difficult and obscure piano music. To those who know the Sorabji lore, Don's 3-hour broadcast on New York's WNCN radio in 1970 of music by and discussion about Sorabji is a milestone in the public recognition of Sorabji as a composer. This program received a strong response from the WNCN audience, and was subsequently played on several other radio stations throughout America. Don continued to help bring the music of Sorabji to a wider audience by publishing Sorabji's music and by writing the introduction to a collection of essays and musical criticism by Sorabji.

The last time I saw Don was at Juilliard for a concert featuring excerpts from Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum. I sat between him and a pianist who had recorded Sorabji's music, and for all the conversations Don and I had had about Sorabji up until then I was still floored by his bar-by-bar knowledge and genuine love for the music.

Last year he mentioned that he had in his possession a quantity of correspondence between himself and Sorabji. I am not aware when that correspondence began or ended or what it contains. Sorabji was among the most interesting if maladjusted personalities of 20^th century music, but he dropped his purportedly reclusive armor to let Don all the way into his world, and I wonder if Sorabji's correspondence with Don Garvelmann could strike an interesting balance against Sorabji's published writings, or even against his correspondence with Philip Heseltine decades earlier.

Don was one of the first friends I ever had in New York. He opened his world to me and to my friends, and he introduced me to some of my childhood piano heros and villains. I can not believe I am writing about him in the past.