Cover photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash

TL;DR- I’m going to start doing some exciting new things on Substack and I hope they justify a paid content model.

Some ideas that come to mind worth addressing in this piece:

1. The feeling of at least mild embarrassment when you look back at something you did or wrote many years ago in relation to how much you have improved since then
2. The experience that four years of monthly lectures have given me
3. The recent desire to do something more substantial with writing
4. A need for a better/more useful outlet for my obsessive list-making and lecture planning, considering I’ve got monthly lectures scheduled out beyond, I kid you not, 2036

A couple of recent posts of mine have been related to at least some of the above, hoping perhaps to have something (more) helpful or influential or insightful to say more specifically about some composers that I might want to ‘specialize in,’ at the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing. 

Thinking more recently about the approach that I took with my posts from years ago as compared with the lectures I’ve been teaching has made me think there is probably a happy, more scalable middle ground that may be of greater interest and value than what I wrote in the past, even if many of the articles I wrote years ago appear in the top five results on Google, or in some cases are THE top result. 

The lectures I’ve been doing have relied very heavily on score reading for a number of reasons, and that has put quite some limit on the pieces I am able to teach. If I can’t get the score, I’m unable to do the kind of analysis I do these days. 

For one, I try to understand as much as possible about the structure of a piece, the orchestration, rhythms, and all of those things that you get a better understanding of by reading along. If nothing else, it forces focused listening, and I always get a far better ‘feel’ of the piece and remember it more when I sit down to follow along. In some cases, it may not be possible, and in the past it just meant closing my eyes and envisioning the music as much as possible. 

The second reason I need scores for the lectures is because in class, we actually follow along with the score in real time, along with all of my color-coded notes about the structure, themes, and other moments or events to listen for and see where they happen. (I’ve not been sharing those lectures publicly because I use a non-PD recording of the featured piece for each month in a setting that can still be considered fair use, but I’ve got some potential ideas for how to make all my time and effort on those available and not violate any copyright.)

In preparing these lectures, the majority of which featuring pieces I’d written about before, I came to have a far greater appreciation for the details and nuts-and-bolts inner workings of the piece, even of those I thought I knew relatively well. That four-year learning process has made me more equipped to do better analysis of other pieces in a much more thorough way. 

I want my writing to be more concrete, research-based type reference stuff than it was before, and I’ve been reaching out to publishers, archives, museums, and other institutions to try to get access to scores and other reference material I would need to do this kind of research and more informed writing. 

This is something I did far less of back in the day, instead just listening to the piece a whole bunch, sometimes quite blindly, but doing my best to get the lay of the land, so to speak, as with someone like Rautavaara, who I inexplicably and incapably wrote about very early in my blogging career. Those early posts read very much like, “This piece is good. It is sad and then happy. I like it. It is good.” I’m capable of more than that now. It was experiential and journal-y, but not reference-y, and I want to do and be more of the latter. 

Have I hit all the talking points I mentioned above? I believe so. Despite having written a lot of very amateur, unresearched, very opinion-based pieces about many very wonderful pieces (and some not so), a lot of them are top results on Google and that has to mean that some people somewhere have found them useful. I’d like to do better, more thorough research and writing, especially if (let’s just be honest) I can cover some of my time and effort cost in a monetary fashion. Is Substack the way to do that? I don’t know if it’s the platform for that, but we’re going to try out the concept at least. I have a lot of ideas for content and overall experiences and media beyond just articles, and that’s hopefully something you, dear reader, might enjoy. 

I will of course keep things going around here because this is and always will be home, but I’m going to try to expand on what I’ve established (and yes, admittedly left to languish recently) over the past 14 years or whatever. Join me and let’s see how it goes, and thank you as always.