Obituary David Mings

This morning I received the obituary of David Mings. David came in the eighties from Texas to The Hague to study baroque bassoon and dulcian. During that time and shortly thereafter, he was rapidly developing into one of our leading musicians, a development that unfortunately came to a halt in 1990 when he was diagnosed with AIDS . While his performing appearances became less frequent, rather than “throw in the towel’ he chose to devote himself with great success to instrument building, musicological research, teaching, researching libraries for unpublished documents and in recent years even to composition. David was fortunate that the drugs that were developed against AIDS beginning in the early nineties resonated well with him and despite the fact that side-effects were not entirely pleasant, his life was prolonged by them and they allowed him to be productive. But it was a delicate balance . He decidedly did not ever really get used to the conditions of the disease nor its treatment, but he communicated another aspect of his situation which he deemed “fortunate”; that this circumstance happened to him in the Netherlands which was not in his homeland. He knew that if it were otherwise, for as he himself said, if this had been the case in the USA he would have likely be living this phase of his life “crippled and in poverty in a cardboard box on the street.” He asserted that in the Netherlands, even with such a terrible condition, it would be possible to live a dignified life. For this he was grateful. In 1990, while I was abroad, Henk de Wit sent me a CD of David’s performances, accompanied by the note ” this will be his last performance of David , he has AIDS .” Now , in March 2014 , we say goodbye to someone who has lived in “injury time” almost twenty-five years , all this time with death on the pillow next to him. Unimaginable. There is an example to be found here of the precious attributes of courage and perseverance not to be overlooked or discounted in this world of fleeting and superficial values. David had them in abundance. In David we have lost not only a versatile artist, but – and this is important – we have lost an incredibly likeable man . Goodbye young man ! Listen here to Canzone La Tromboncia: Translation: Jesse Read