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I just noticed today that my collected Youtube videos have now been viewed more than 200,000 times. As I've mentioned many times, though the MM in MMmusing was originally supposed to stand for my initials as well as "Music & Meaning," it has long since become clear that MultiMedia musing is central to the blog's mission - not just musing about multimedia, but musing via multimedia. So, the 200k milestone is gratifying, although I have no idea just who watches these videos and how many of those viewers recoil in horror and quickly skip to something else. (I'm sure most of the 2000-plus who've watched this one were looking for Monty Python's lumberjacks, but hopefully the dancing axe has won a few fans.)

Somewhat surprisingly, my two most-viewed videos have been these little Bach canon animations; the one on the left (which I find less interesting) has attracted more than 70,000 views and the little crabs have crawled across almost 50,000 screens. That's something to be proud of!

   

I sent my Twitter acquaintances a challenge to help me get my 12 Composers up over 10,000 views before Christmas Day 2010 (it had already been up for a couple of years) and I'm happy to say that goal was achieved - but most of the other videos have just been getting by on their own since they were first released into the wild via this blog. It's a strange experience to toss stuff out there and then wait to see what catches a wave.Though it still hasn't found a huge audience, I would say I'm most proud of The Rite of Appalachian Spring - a nice little blend of verbal and musical puns. My other personal favorites are Chopin's ghosts, Poulenc's merry-go-round, and my original Ambigram on the name B-A-C-H. 

YouTube is an amazing site, obviously, but I do wish they'd provide better options for designing and customizing channels. You can certainly track down all 90 of my uploaded videos on my channel (NOTE: about 30 of the videos are outputs for Mr. Stravinsky's Random Accent Generator), but I decided to make a very simple little page that provides even easier access to my favorite multimedia creations. Just click below (may take some time to load):

And finally, I have one new video that I posted today. It's actually an audio file (to which I've now added a score) that I originally blogged about two years ago, back before YouTube had become such a musical place. It's not a clever mashup or animation - just something lovely by Bach. This movement is best-known in its violin concerto version (in A minor), but Bach also arranged the concerto for solo harpsichord (in G Minor). I recorded it early one winter morning, doing my best to cover the string parts where necessary (most of the essential stuff is doubled in the keyboard part). As I wrote in this blog post, I love the dialogue between the stubborn bass line and the beautifully shaped melody that floats above. The slow movement of Beethoven's 4th concerto is often described as Orpheus (the piano) taming the Furies (the orchestra), and though the opposition of forces isn't as obvious in the Bach, I hear the same kind of interaction here. I remember that when I first heard this music years ago, I found the repetitiveness of the bass line to be a bit annoying; but perhaps it's supposed to be that way, and I think it's quite telling that the R.H. melody gets the last word.