Oh Carl! I don’t know how many times I said these two words over my lifetime—way more than several hundred, maybe even thousands of times. I said “Oh, Carl!” mostly in moments of exasperation, or resignation, but sometimes even in times of joy and elation. Or even to get his attention— “Oh, Carl, can you look at this?”

Our business partner, Peter Hallock, and maybe even one of the Seattle Compline Choir guys, Vernon Nicodemus, started to refer to my late husband as “Oh Carl.” For example, one of them would say “I spoke to ‘Oh, Carl’ on the telephone today,” or “Are you going to send this to ‘Oh, Carl’ for review?”

I was certainly thinking of those two little words this past weekend as I began the arduous task of making a detailed inventory list, boxing and hauling Carl’s collections of choral, instrumental and vocal music on compact disc where they are destined for the University of Hawaii Music Department.

Thank God, when I wrote to Dr. Jace Saplan, director of choral activities, about the collection of nearly 1000 choral CDs, he responded with: “Hi Kathy, We would love them!!”

There were over 200 CDs of Bach cantatas directed by Masaaki Suzuki (Bach Collegium Japan), John Eliot Gardiner (Monteverdi Choir), Philippe Herreweghe (Collegium Vocale Gent), Jeffrey Thomas (American Bach Soloists), Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt (Academy of Ancient Music), multiple copies of the St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, Magnificat, and Christmas Oratorio. Altogether there were nearly 300 CDs of just Bach choral works!

And that’s not even counting his 10 CDs of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, 3 different performances of the Orchestral Suites, Bach violin sonatas, cello sonatas, oboe concertos, viola da gamba sonatas and 16 CDs of Bach’s harpsichord music. “Oh Carl” loved his Bach!

Then of course, choral music by other composers: the Bach Family (music by Bachs other than J. S.), Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Howells, Schumann, Schubert, and even Stravinsky. A big chunk of the collection were compilations by English and American Choirs (Kings College, St. John’s College, Cambridge Singers, Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, Dale Warland Singers, Church of the Advent Boston, American Repertory Singers, Chanticleer, etc.) Oh, and about 200 CDs of just Christmas music!

Jonathan Korth, professor of piano, responded: “Whoa, that is A LOT of CD’s and glad to hear the choir can use them! Sure, we can certainly try to use the piano lit ones as well. If the library has duplicates or doesn’t want additional CD’s, we can likely use them in the department or have a student giveaway which they’d be very excited about.“

I wish I could show you a picture of Carl sitting in the recliner, wearing headphones, music in hand and “conducting” or singing along with the recordings. It actually drove me bonkers to hear him sing just the alto part when he was studying or preparing the score. Of course, all I could hear was him singing along, and not the rest of the music, since he had headphones on.

And I haven’t even begun to tell you about three big bagfuls of CDs I gave to Ian Capps, president of Early Music Hawaii, which I categorized as early music before 1750—maybe over 100 CDs. [UPDATE: It was about 175 CDs!]

Of course, Carl used all these CDs to listen for new repertoire or to hear interpretations of the pieces he was conducting at the time.

This still leaves me with about 100 CDs of organ music which I plan to share with members of the Hawaii Chapter American Guild of Organists. And of course I still have a bunch of CDs of my own performances or those of the Lutheran Church of Honolulu where the two of us were for so many years.

Over 50 boxes of CDs are loaded into my car and ready to go!

“Oh, Carl!”