Tim Page

Tim Page (born Ellis Batten Page Jr.; 11 October 1954) is an American writer, music critic, editor, producer and professor who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism for The Washington Post.

Anthony Tommasini, the chief music critic for The New York Times, has praised Page's criticism for its "extensive knowledge of cultural history, especially literature; the instincts and news sense of a sharp beat reporter; the skills of a good storyteller; infectious inquisitiveness; immunity to dogma; and an always-running pomposity detector."

Other notable writings by Page include his biography of the novelist Dawn Powell, which is credited for helping to spark the revival of Powell's work, and a memoir that chronicles growing up with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder.

Page was born in San Diego, California to Elizabeth Latimer Thaxton Page, a homemaker and former journalist, and Ellis Batten Page, a professor of educational psychology.

Through his parents' record collection, Page developed an early fascination for music, particularly for the opera singers Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar, and for "music that was nearly changeless, unfolding slowly and inevitably, with few surprises."

During their time in San Diego, the family was acquainted with Alan M. Kriegsman, then the music critic for the San Diego Union, and his wife Sali Ann Kriegsman, who lived in Page's grandmother's house.

Page credits "Mike" Kriegsman for having an early influence on his desire to write about music:

This interview was released on the three-CD set A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations 1955 & 1981 in 2002.

In 1962, Page's father accepted a full professorship at the University of Connecticut, where he would later help develop a system of grading essays by the computer known as Project Essay Grade (PEG) software.

He recruited his siblings and classmates in his early efforts in filmmaking; in 1967, Page and his films were the subject of a short documentary by David and Iris Hoffman.

A Day With Timmy Page screened in the 1968 New York Film Festival and as the opening selection of the first Festival of Young Filmmakers in New York.

On 20 May 1972, Page was a passenger in a vehicle accident that killed two close friends.

He does not drive to this day and attributes his reluctance to do so in part to this accident.

Shortly after, Page attended an introductory class in Transcendental Meditation, beginning a lifelong habit of meditation.

The Page family moved to Storrs, Connecticut; Page lived there until 1975, save a year-long stint from 1969 to 1970, when the family relocated to Caracas, Venezuela during Ellis Page's sabbatical.

From an early age, Page demonstrated an increasingly encyclopedic knowledge of music and an aptitude to catalogue significant historical names and dates.

Page's father used him as his "laboratory of choice" in experiments with standardized testing, and eventually began taking Page to his classes to "perform as a burgeoning genius."

Page struggled in school even as his musical abilities matured and his interests in literature and film, especially silent film, deepened.

In 1975, Page returned to the Tanglewood Institute, where he had spent previous summers.

There, Page met the musician, teacher, writer and arts administrator Leonard Altman, whom Page credits as his "most significant mentor."

Under Altman's guidance, Page moved to New York City in 1975 to enroll at the Mannes School of Music.

Page attended Mannes for two years, where he studied music composition with Charles Jones.

He quickly "decided that [he] was more interested in writing prose than in writing music" and transferred to Columbia University.

Page dates his first mature piece of criticism to April 1976, when he was moved to write an essay about the world premiere of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians."

Several weeks after graduating from Columbia, Page sent an unsolicited article about the 1979 release of the complete works of Anton Webern conducted by Pierre Boulez to the SoHo Weekly News.

The paper accepted, published, and paid for the article.

"And suddenly," Page writes in his memoir, "I was a music critic."

Over the next several years, Page continued writing for the SoHo Weekly News and other publications while hosting a contemporary music program on the Columbia radio station WKCR.

Page spoke over the phone with Gould for the first time in October 1980; what was supposed to be a brief interview lasted for nearly four hours.

Over the next two years, Page and Gould spoke on the phone several times a week.

They met only once during a three-day visit Page paid to Gould in Toronto, where the two conducted a one-hour radio drama comparing Gould's two versions of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations.

In 1981, he began an 11-year association with WNYC-FM, where he presented an afternoon program that broadcast interviews with composers and musicians, including guests like Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Dizzy Gillespie and Meredith Monk.

Page has become one of the leading writers on the work of the idiosyncratic Canadian pianist Glenn Gould.

Page was a music writer and culture reporter at The New York Times from 1982 to 1987; in 1987, he became the chief music critic of Newsday.

Page edited the first collection of Gould's writings, The Glenn Gould Reader, in 1984, which has never gone out of print.

More recently, in 2019 the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, California screened A Day With Timmy Page along with two of Page's early films.

"Prodigies have a tough time of things," Page wrote in his memoir.

His own experiences as a child genius, and the extreme praise and ostracism that came with it, influenced his later skepticism for solo careers for child artists and what he has described as "the cult of the prodigy":

Despite that, Page was also an early champion of Midori Gotō; he first praised her playing when she was 14 years old and later profiled her when she was 21.

Page struggled with depression and anxiety throughout his later teen years: