In Memoriam: Anthony H. Cordesman

BLOG

by Jonathan Valin
May 10, 2024

In this month of tribulations, it is my sad duty to report that Tony Cordesman, our friend and longtime contributor to The Absolute Sound (and many other publications), passed away after a short illness on January 29, 2024. I don’t have to tell you that Tony was a mainstay of our magazine, a scrupulous listener with a deep, abiding interest in classical music and its realistic reproduction. What you may not know is that, in real life, Tony was a celebrated national security analyst, who wrote over 50 books on U.S. security policy, a Professor of National Security Studies at Georgetown University, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution, a national security assistant to Senator John McCain, and a principal investigator on the CSIS Homeland Defense Project, among many, many other governmental and international positions. He was also a winner of the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award.

As part of his jobs, Tony traveled the world extensively and constantly, chairing and contributing to worldwide conferences. But there was not a place he went (and he went everywhere) in which he didn’t seek out and attend live concerts. He not only knew classical music intimately well; he also knew the sound of that music played in the great European venues. Many of his reviews reflected this vast experience with the absolute sound and how it differed from recorded sound, due to close miking and tipped-up microphones. He also had long experience with digital sound, from its rocky start to its current iterations.

All of us at TAS send our heartfelt condolences to Tony’s family and friends. He will be missed—and remembered.

Tags: AHC ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN IN MEMORIAM

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.