The Best Posts of the Year

This will be the 327th post of 2015. I have put up slightly fewer posts this year than in the previous ones--in 2013 there were 430 posts--and I think the reason is twofold. First, I am less likely to put up short posts. They tend to end up in the Friday Miscellanea. Instead, the posts are a bit more substantial, so there are fewer of them. Also, I have been spending more time composing and playing this year. Quite a few hours went into the recording of my complete Songs from the Poets. You will be seeing more of those songs pretty soon.

But right now I want to look back at the year and pick out some posts that I think represent the best of the Music Salon. I hope you will take some time to look at them and, if you have some comments, especially general ones about what you have enjoyed and what you would like to see more of, let 'em fly!

January:

• About the way our perception of Beethoven has changed over the years: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/01/two-beethovens-at-least.html
• How the social justice crusade is actually very unjust: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/01/beat-drum-equally.html

February:

• How we impoverish our concert experience by excluding previously popular genres like the divertimento: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/02/forbidden-genres.html
• By way of a discussion of an Alex Ross piece on Björk, I talk about the Hidden Commandments of the Powers that Be: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/02/bjork.html

• Ten of my favourite pieces of music: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/02/ten-favorite-pieces-of-music.html
• I took two posts to talk about the Beethoven Violin Concerto: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/02/concerto-guide-beethoven-violin.html http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/02/concerto-guide-beethoven-violin_12.html

(With older posts it is often the case that the original YouTube clip is no longer available. So you may have to search for a replacement. I usually try to give enough information for this to be easy. In the case of these posts, for example, you should be able to find a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto quite easily--possibly even one by Hilary Hahn.)

March:

• In which I talk about aesthetic relativism and how it relates to moral relativism: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/03/aesthetic-facts-and-opinions.html
• In which I talk about one of the fundamentals of the history of music in the 20th century and what is wrong with it: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/03/emancipation-of-dissonance.html

April:

• In this post I am claiming that the real purpose and end of music is the pleasure of the listener: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-pleasures-of-music.html
• Here is a post about one of the very greatest pieces of music of all time: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/04/bach-mass-in-b-minor.html

May:

• Here is one of my quirky looks at the theory of music in which I talk about the difference between structure and texture: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/05/texture-and-structure.html
• This is one of the more thorough posts I have written on the notation of rhythm: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/05/time-signatures-compound-composite-and.html

June:

• This is a post that offers some ideas about why modernism happened: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-culture-without-art.html
• Part of a series of posts on concertos, this one is on the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Prokofiev: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2015/06/concerto-guide-prokofiev-violin.html

Well, that will give you something to browse through! I will do the second half of the year in another post.

And, as a musical envoi, here is Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchesta Seiji Ozawa, conductor in the Beethoven Violin Concerto: