MMmusing: 15

What a boring blog post title! Today is indeed the fifteenth anniversary of MMmusing, but I haven't come up with a clever angle on this. I've realized that 15, though roundish, is actually a pretty uninteresting number. I thought of posting a list of Top 15 Posts or Top 15 Videos or whatever, but 15 seems like too many for a well-curated list.

So, here's just a quick "State of the Blog" spiel. Let's see...2007 was a pretty long time ago, so I guess I've been doing this a while. The past year was relatively slow after a strong January/February start to 2021, but I've had another busy start to 2022 with seven (soon to be eight) new fugues, some syncopated loops, and some general rambling. The future is bright.

Though it still may not be totally clear why I keep doing this in fits and starts for a fairly small audience, I am grateful to have so many half-baked thoughts and unique proof-of-concept videos and webpages archived. It's been long enough and I'm now old enough that I can find posts I'd completely forgotten about. I think that's the main reason I do this. I walk (drive, sit) around a lot thinking about these sorts of things - might as well preserve those ephemeral thoughts in....whatever this is.

I was thinking this week about a competition that took place around 2011 or 2012 for "best classical music blog." Blogs were still a good bit more hip and relevant then, but I remember being struck by two things (for what admittedly was a pretty gimmicky contest). Because the judging was to be based on a series of writing challenges, 1) the competition was stuck with the idea that a blog is just like an informal version of writing for print (newspaper, magazines) and thus fundamentally about words, and 2) the competition was really only about a limited series of exercises, not the building of a unique, long-term brand.

Meanwhile, I as I've said and emphasized way too many times but will say again, the attraction of a digital platform for me is not just the free, unedited publishing (though I enjoy not being edited as evidenced by parenthetical diversions like this), but rather the idea that writing about music can be seamlessly integrated with audio and other multimedia illustrations. I love to read and can even enjoy the imagination required to look at printed musical examples or read a description of some musical process. But here's an example of a video I'd forgotten about which makes several complex points quickly and efficiently; I'd rarely want to be stuck merely with words, even though I love words. I absolutely did not set out to create a multimedia-themed blog, but that's the shape things have taken, and I've done so many cool things I'd never have imagined without taking that first step.

I suppose one of the many reasons blogs have lost a lot of influence is that talking-head videos are now the preferred, more likely viral medium for this kind of work. Adam Neely gets millions of views for his very well-conceived and multimedia-rich videos. He's a very sharp thinker who zeroes in on topics really well, so I'm not suggesting I could match his abilities if I tried. I have thought of trying my hand at the talking head thing (though I hate hearing my own voice), but generally I still prefer the asynchronous experience which reading allows, with links and multimedia provided to let the reader explore as needed. Though this is clearly not the best way to get views, I'm content to continue documenting whatever I'm thinking about at the pace it naturally happens with good ol' old-fashioned Blogger as my home base.

As always, you're encouraged to try the Magical Multimedia Musing Machine to see where the winds take you. Hope to be back here next year when I can title the post: "I am sixteen, going on seventeen."

And, ok, after all of that, here is a quick list of fifteen - not necessarily the Top 15, but a post from every year featuring a fairly wide variety of things. Compositions, Arrangements, Mashups, Performances, Programming, Animations, Words, etc. I intentionally tried to avoid some of the things I've already promoted over and over. (Some of these, like the first five listed, involved a lot of work, so as lighthearted as the tone here generally is, I'm proud of the investment of time and problem-solving that goes into projects like these.)