Appreciation for Jon Iverson
Across the decades, a great near-monthly joy in reading Stereophile has been coming across mention of a meaningful, often arcane, aspect in my own stereophonic journey, eg, Bud Fried, whose 1980s transmission-line monitors I still delight in. In this August’s case, the surprise is a note about Jon Iverson. Like Jon, I first came under the spell of gamelan music in the mid-1980s, and since have visited Indonesia many times and collected hundreds of titles on CD. (It helped to have owned a CD-only store when the majority of these titles were coming out.) A small handful of composers, eg, Tenzer, Ziporyn, and Macht, wrote works for gamelan ensembles in the style of Indonesian music, but Jon went well beyond, creating an entirely new experience using…
