Future Projects

Now that I'm back at home, I want to take up an unfinished project and launch some new ones. I think this is important because I want to avoid what I think commonly happens with blogs, which is that they slump into being chroniclers of the everyday. Mind you, this may be exactly how most bloggers conceive of what they do. But from the very beginning I have always attempted to do other things as well. Some of these include exploring aesthetic problems, evaluating performances, doing a modest amount of music education, talking about, yes, issues of the day, and doing some large-scale projects. In the past these have included a survey of musical masterworks, a chronological look at the concerto form and series of posts on the Beethoven symphonies and piano sonatas, the Shostakovich string quartets, the Prokofiev piano sonatas and the Haydn symphonies.

Just before I left for Spain I was in the middle of an extended series of posts on Monteverdi and was just about to start on Orfeo, so I will continue that project. I want to start a new project on Stravinsky that we might call "The Road to the Rite" where I will take a close look at the Firebird, Petroushka and then the Rite of Spring itself. I might do some posts on Sofia Gubaidulina and why Finland is a musical superpower (and why Canada is not). If you have some ideas about what might be a good project or single post, just tell me about it in the comments.

Here, from Boosey and Hawkes, the cool composer t-shirt of the season:

That's the stage layout of the instruments from the score of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Oh, what the heck, let's give it a listen: