Roger Cope joined forces with CVNC in the summer of 2003, initially helping us cover guitar concerts as we began to extend our coverage into Western NC. He’d written extensively before he got here, in various genres including motor cars (which may sound like a strange discipline for a reviewer but please remember that former N&O writer Dan Neil won the Pulitzer in Los Angeles for his car criticism). In fact, Roger wrote (and still writes) about things he enjoys, and his delight was (and is) always apparent in his published work. Insofar as music is concerned, he attended the NEA-sponored Arts Journalism Classical Music & Opera week at Columbia in October 2005, after which his writing got even better. And indeed we found Roger’s writing skills to be so exemplary that we chose him to be Editor on September 1, 2006.
Roger’s relocation to California let us test the hypothesis that web journals could be run effectively from anywhere, and he helped us expand ours as CVNC grew from a small, mostly classical platform (with a Triangle-only theatre component) to what we offer today – around 500 reviews a year, statewide, thousands (literally) of calendar events, and much, much more.
In Bakersfield, teaching and playing, too, gradually took on more and more prominent roles in Roger’s life, and with his recent establishment of the Guitar Arts Academy we all knew it was just a matter of time before “real work” overtook his CVNC cultural writing and editing pursuits.
That time arrives today.
We hope he’ll contribute a CD review or a think-piece from time to time. But meanwhile we thank and praise Roger for all he has done to sustain and improve CVNC over the years, in dark days and happier times as well.
Good luck to you, good and faithful servant of music and dance and arts journalism! And thank you for all you have done for CVNC!
John Lambert, Interim Music & Dance Editor (effective tomorrow)
