Music shaped Kenny Sloan’s ear long before anything else began to organize his life.

In his home, music never arrived as an event. It was continuous. His father worked in the record industry and ran a record shop in Times Square, later moving to J&R Records near City Hall. The house carried that same density of sound, records playing at all hours, not curated, not framed, simply present.

“We always remember the artists,” Susan Madden once observed. “What do we remember in Bach’s time? We remember Bach.” Her remark is not an erasure of patronage, nor a dismissal of institutional leadership. It is an acknowledgment of cultural memory. We archive composers, virtuosi, conductors, and voices that endure. We canonize the visible. What we rarely memorialize is the infrastructure that made that visibility possible.