I actually have a couple of things prepared to blog about, but will save one for the near future (tomorrow?). Today, I'm again posting something I created informally which I still thought worth documenting, so this goes in the "Emptying the Desk Drawer" category (see end of post for the complete set). In this case, this past Sunday morning I ran across music I'd created quickly and played on July 6. As the "July 4-adjacent" Sunday this year, we had originally scheduled to have a flutist play "America the Beautiful" (which actually appears in our hymnal) in an arrangement I intended to make. When the flutist ended up being unable to play that day, I decided I'd invent something for organ alone. The music occurs during the Offertory, which generally doesn't need to be more than 2-3 minutes on quiet summer Sundays, so what I ended up with really just moves through the tune once, slowly, with short intro, final phrase repetition, and coda.
The best way to describe it is that I intentionally chose lots of unexpected harmonies and also some unprepared key changes to give the music an air of mystery and uncertainty. This is not intended as any sort of focused political critique. However, although "America the Beautiful" is a perfectly good song, I've always found it to be somewhat saccharine. I've never agreed with those who think it should be our national anthem, and I genuinely prefer "the banner" even though it's problematic in lots of ways. Just like our country! (Or any country.) So in this version, maybe the purple mountain majesty is also a little more dangerous (you could fall off one of those mountains) and the spacious skies a bit more forbidding (thunderstorms, aliens). Maybe. Probably best to let it speak for itself as I played it that morning. You'll hear some background shuffling of the ushers, but that feels right for how this music should sound.
One bit of business before ending today. This is my 700th blog post. In some respects, this is a misleading number since I had 171 (!) posts back in the debut year of 2007. Had I continued at that pace, I would be well over 3000 posts by now. On the other hand, over the previous five years I've averaged about 16.5 posts a year (compared to about 16 posts a month in 2007). So if my 18+ years had moved at that pace, I'd be just a little over 300. At this point, it would be a cool, though ambitious goal to hit 750 on the blog's 20th anniversary in February, 2027, but that's getting head of myself.
As I've mentioned before, in the early years of blogging (before feedreaders and then Twitter were common), posting very regularly was an important part of building readership since a blog needed to function like a reliable destination. If the blog went cold, readers might never return. But this meant sometimes a post would be more of a placeholder. Of course, at that point, I was also searching for a voice and a purpose, without really understanding then that multimedia creations would become such a core aspect of my "musing." Some posts from 2007 might've have represented no more than 30 minutes of effort. Many posts from the past ten years have represented 10-20 hours or more of effort - sometimes a lot more.
So, although the pace has slowed, those 171 posts were part of getting this off the ground, and honestly I would never have dreamed I'd accomplish so much here when I first started. And while Blogger now seems like a very old-fashioned platform from which all the cool kids have long since fled, I really like having one consistent archive on which the countless cross-links should all still work. Cross-links are one of the best things about a blog!
As always on milestone days like this, I will point out that there are a few ways to interact with the blog archive. First of all, the mobile version of Blogger, unfortunately, will likely just show you the last few posts with no sidebar information, but if you click on "View web version" at the bottom, you'll be able to see the complete year-by-year archive along with a very old list of "signature posts." (That list could really use updating!)
There is also a link on the "web version" to my unique "MM Multimedia Musing Machine" which serves up one of about 550 possible multimedia creations each time you click the red button. (I'm a big believer in the power of random.) There's also an interactive table of contents here which includes a chronological list of selected posts which may easily be filtered using key words.
And here you will find previous entries in my virtual desk-cleaning exercise. (If only I'd get around to cleaning out real desks!)
- The Two Gustavs: Emptying the Desk Drawer #1
- Riding the Railing: Emptying the Desk Drawer #2
- Haydnween: Emptying the Desk Drawer #3
- Bracing Bruckner (Emptying the Desk Drawer #4)
- Carousel Memories (Emptying the Desk Drawer #5)
- Cinderella Chopin (Emptying the Desk Drawer #6)
- When the dog barks (Emptying the Desk Drawer #7)
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