Oh, pinch me -- I’m being quoted in a history book.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s authorized anniversary book, "50 Years of Music," will be available in bookstores this month. For orchestra fans, it’s a keepsake, with lots of memory-sparking photographs and backstage tales.

And for a commissioned history, it’s remarkable candid, dwelling almost relentlessly on upheavals, money problems and personality clashes as well as the many triumphs of the past five decades. It’s like a birthday portrait that shows all the wrinkles.

Speaking of wrinkles, the quotations attributed to me were written some 30 years ago. The older I get, the better I was.

The orchestra originally commissioned former Washington Post music critic Tim Page to write the book, and I was among a group of music critics he interviewed when the project was launched more than a year ago. The deal with Page fell through and the orchestra turned to Dave Kenney, a Twin Cities writer who specializes in popular books on Minnesota history. In the end, Page provided a short essay for the book's introduction.

Had Page stuck with the project, the likely result would have been a book of national weight, with more in the way of musicological insights and analytical opinions about the SPCO’s place in the world of classical music. Kenney, a generalist who relied heavily on interviews and newspaper archives, has created a more localized history book, which is just as valuable in its own way. In that regard, it’s splendid.

The book is organized by eras of artistic leadership -- starting with the tense, political maneuvering that replaced the amateur St. Paul Civic Orchestra with a professional chamber orchestra under its first (and largely untried) conductor, Leopold Sipe. The first concert, on Nov. 18, 1959, took place in St. Paul’s Central High School auditorium before a tiny audience of 150.

I covered the SPCO for only a few years, starting in 1978 when I replaced St. Paul Pioneer Press critic John Harvey, who had been an ardent supporter of the orchestra and joined its board of directors soon after retiring from the paper. Dennis Russell Davies, who had replaced Sipe after an awkwardly handled transition in 1972, had turned the SPCO into an exhilarating -- though sometimes confounding -- vehicle for new music. The orchestra was young and hip -- and teetering on financial disaster.

I was around for Davies’ final season in 1979-80 and I chronicled the transition to Pinchas Zukerman’s leadership before switching to full-time reviewing of theater. For me, the switch was fortuitous, because Zukerman -- who brought in international stars and the recording contracts and had a lot to do with getting the Ordway Center built -- was an easy-listening kind of guy in those days (make that Mozart, Mozart and more Mozart), and reviewing the concerts would have become a real chore.

Even so, I got a taste of the seismic upheavals that can take place in big arts organizations during changes in leadership. In its final chapters, the book chronicles the 20-year evolution -- with time out for a crisis or two -- that took the orchestra through "artistic commissions" (John Adams, Christopher Hogwood, Hugh Wolff) to its current status as a unique kind of musical collective with "artistic partners," who rotate through themed leadership roles.In the end, it’s a loving book about an institution that is locally beloved as well as internationally known. You can find it at Barnes & Noble and Borders stores around the Twin Cities. The published price is $30.