I've admired this site since it debuted more than a decade ago, inspired by the legendary Dwight's Journal of Music, a 19th century Boston institution. In a time when major newspapers are not really able (for mostly good reasons) to cover a town's musical scene, the Intelligencer provides a remarkable number of reviews (mostly written by volunteers, I believe) of local events as well as an indispensable concert listings page, various feature stories, and a lively reader commentariat. One can find a wide variety of viewpoints which provide a fascinating and reasonably broad picture of our local musical life. Some of the reviews display high levels of expertise and allow more room for digressions and personal commentary than a newspaper would. The commenter perspective can seem analogous at times to how sports radio gives voice to more than just the newspaper columnists. Although ill-mannered banter sometimes is a result, in general the Symphony Hall gang has a lot to offer, especially in showing how passionately people care about the music that comes to life on our stages.
I've always had an interesting relationship to music reviewers in that 1) I love reading reviews of concerts and recordings, 2) I don't feel like I would ever want to write such reviews. This is somewhat paradoxical because I do enjoy encountering strong opinions, and I sometimes have strong opinions; but I tend to feel like my own opinions about a given performance are too hopelessly subjective to be given the weight of print, virtual or otherwise.
There's also the fact that I don't actually get out to that many live concerts for various life reasons. As I wrote back in 2008, I sometimes feel like Tom Townsend from Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, who would argue passionately about the strengths and weaknesses of Jane Austen novels, only to admit that he'd never actually read the books - just the literary criticism. It's probably fair to say that I enjoy living on the periphery of the music world, diving in every now and then but often viewing from a distance, and the work I do on this blog has a similar relationship to actual performing. What I'm doing here is often articulating around the edges of what's going on in performance of a given musical work, rather than just performing the music and letting it speak for itself.
Anyway, as the Intelligencer concert listings page is a bit more dispensable during the pandemic, I figured this was a good time to promote access to the mostly online musical diversions I've been creating here. It does perhaps feel a little dissonant to promote my own "play" in a time of suffering and loss, but of course all artists are grappling with what it means to make art in such times. And I do intentionally use the word "play" to suggest something more substantive than it might first appear. I have definitely found that I'm listening to music and thinking about music more during the past two months, and though there may be some element of escapism there, it's also about connecting more deeply with music's expressive and spiritual power.
As for promoting the blog, I am always hopeful that my strange creations will find their audience, however spread out around the world that audience might be. And I've also always wanted to resist the idea that a blog is just an ephemeral collection of passing thoughts. Packaging a lot of those thoughts together is a way to affirm that something more lasting is happening here. As I wrote way back in 2008 when I debuted my "Multimedia Musing Machine":
George Costanza once said, while trying to impress a NYC tour guide who thought he'd just moved in from Arkansas, "You know if you take everything I've ever done in my entire life and condense it down into one day... it looks decent." To paraphrase, "if you take everything I've ever done in my entire blogging career and condense it down into one post...it looks decent."
