Merci beaucoup, domo arigato

Belatedly, I'd like to offer thanks for two awards that The Rest Is Noise recently received: a Music Pen Club prize in Japan and the Grand Prix des Muses in France. I obviously owe a particular debt to the translators — Toshie Kakinuma and Laurent Slaars — who prepared the editions that won favorable notice. Slaars, not only a brilliant translator but also a singer who appears on several significant recordings by William Christie, accepted the Grand Prix on my behalf. The ceremony took place at the Fondation Singer-Polignac, with the great French music authority Claude Samuel presiding. As it happens, the Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, figures prominently in my narrative as a benefactor of twentieth-century Parisian music. This reminds me that I must finally look into Sylvia Kahan's book In Search of New Scales, about Winnaretta's husband, Edmond de Polignac, Proustian aristocrat and codifier of octatonic composition. Kahan earlier wrote Music's Modern Muse, a splendid biography of the munificent princess.