No idleness to report here. I don't know if anyone reads this "about" blurb any more. I continue to shovel content into the void. I had a bad deal last year, November 14, 2010, whence a disk failure wiped out millions of my web pages, including everything from this "Etude" project. In the meantime I have scanned all my issues up to and including all of 1911, though most of my issues between 1911 and 1920 are scanned as well. I added scans of the cover images for pretty well all my collection. The scans include 626 covers, and my collection probably includes about twice as many copies. I have recently donated a few dozen copies of "The Etude" to a local 2nd-hand shop whence the owner and I had long and lovely conversations about classical music. I have a long and interesting ramble about "What have I been up to?" typed into a Word document but I can not find it.
In Tokio there is a royal Conservatory of Music, possessing what is described by the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung as a "very fine symphony orchestra," composed exclusively of Japanese players under the direction of a German named A. Junker. Leading symphonic and concert works of Bach, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, etc., are given. The account does not say whether the little brown music-makers have attacked the music of Tschaikowky, Rachmaninoff or Rimsky-Korsakoff. We doubt, however, whether Japanese fiddles would conquer the Russians as easily as Japanese warships.
-December, 1910, "World of Music"
"Somebody over in England has made a brilliant suggestion for enabling the police to detect motorists exceeding the speed limit. It is suggested that as a car goes at its fastest allowable pace, a low D should be sounded, and directly this is exceeded, the pitch should be raised automatically, and this would call the attention of the police. This is an excellent idea, especially as it is also suggested that the police should be provided with tuning-forks to enable them to detect the difference. If this idea comes into general acceptance, we shall be reading accounts of motorists being fined for exceeding the speed limit by a diminished fifth. There will also be a new field for musicians as members of the police force." -December, 1910, "World of Music"
It has been a rough week around here, at Scriabin.com, the Etude Magazine web site, and my other sites at Sorabji.com and other places. A hard drive failure wiped out millions of pages, and recovery has been incredibly tedious. Most content survives but re-assembling a lot of it into web site form has, in some cases, proven too time-consuming for me. I manage and create content for a lot of web sites, all of them run by myself on dedicated web servers, so when a server goes bust it results in a lot of work for me. I am very happy to have restored the Etude Magazine covers gallery, not only recovering the previous content of that site but also adding about 70 new covers from a shipment of about 150 magazines sent to me by a very generous individual who found this site and contacted me a few months ago to see if I was interested in acquiring copies from a collection gifted to him. At the moment I must continue to re-assemble the inner workings of this site and some others before fully getting back to content-production, but I see where this will happen soon.
I know Movable Type's templating systems better than the spartan appearance of this web site might indicate. As I move forward with the Etude site, though, I find that when I consider customizing the templates and the publishing settings I decide it is more valuable to just post more content. I can re-design and re-arrange later, though the fundamentals of the site structure are fine by me. Still, I spent the morning devising "featured" content modules and highlights to sit atop the top page, and perhaps replace it. The content is posted in more or less random order. I do not specifically choose content starting from the earliest issues and moving on chronologically. Last week, for instance, I got a request from an Australian music scholar for a specific story from an Etude issue that I had not even scanned yet. In the spirit of helping a fellow music scholar I scanned the requested story and posted it with no regard to any sequence of events. One of the early discoveries I made about Movable Type was that it allowed to me to post-date content to its originally published date but also to sort that content by the order in which I posted it. I imagine other CMSes do this as well but I was surprised at how the vBulletin CMS, for instance, would not even allow me to post date content to pre-1900. It allowed me to create categories any which way I wanted, so I could assign stories from the April, 1898, issue to the 1898 > April category, but to me that was not in the spirit of things to turn a publication date into a category. I guess it goes back to my corporate days of setting up directory structures for news sites, structures which virtually always incorporated a date-based structure at some part of the address.
"Nervousness is often a form of egotism, an overestimation of the magnitude of the function and of the part of the performer in it."
Lawrence Erb,
July, 1920
"But by studying the laws of our being, we can humor our moods and thus secure their co-operation and interest."
Madame A. Pupin
March, 1904
"Pain, pain, pain; that is the key of life; that is the key of knowledge; that is the key of skill."
J.S. Van Cleve
October, 1903
"I believe it is no exaggeration to say that most, if not all of us, waste from a quarter to a half of our time in a vague inattention; a diffused, negative luminosity, instead of a burning focus-point. We keep bestirring ourselves for the two hours that we sit in front of the piano, but we do not turn every minute to account by applying our thoughts steadily to the places that need most attention."
J.S. Van Cleve
June, 1898
"He may have the greatest talent on earth, but unless he develops it in the right manner it will only be a pathetic monument to his lost possibilities."
Mme. Mathilde Marchesi
October, 1913
"Unless the 'career' comes first there is not likely to be any 'career.'
"I wonder if the public ever realizes what this sacrifice means to an artiste--to a woman."
Mary Garden
July, 1920
"One should not forget that the performer of each part is not a mere machine, but a living being who studies or reads his part independently from the others and is therefore entitled to a part which should have a meaning in itself."
Eugenio Di Pirani
July, 1920
"Possibly one of the most practical experiences the young singer can have is that of flat failure."
Emma Calve
October, 1923
"Q. Are the works of Meyerbeer considered as great as those of Wagner?
A. No."
October, 1909
"Through sheer fear of the scorn of posterity there are multitudes of music lovers at this time who are suffering their ears to undergo all sort of tortures rather than condemn music which they do not like."
Editorial
May, 1916
"The early years of the girl who is destined for an operatic career may be much more safely spent with Czerny exercises for the piano or Kreutzer studies for the violin than with Concone Solfeggios for the voice."
Frances Alda
November, 1916
"That is what is the matter with many of the so-called Gospel Hymns. In most cases written for the words to which they are sung, they are as thoroughly associated with the church and worship as it is possible for music to be. Yet, because they are inherently trivial or worse, there is always that feeling of incongruity, almost of sacrilege, which rises in the mind of every understanding listener."
July, 1905
"Strauss' music is often profoundly ugly, but it has an abominable beauty of its own."
April, 1910
If content posting from The Etude seems to have stagnated here it is not for lack of activity behind the scenes. I have been exploring other Content Management Systems for the Etude project, as alternatives to my tried-and-true Movable Type, but I find the results of these experiments to be inconclusive. I was inspired to explore other solutions after blindly spending a lot of money on vBulletin Gold, which takes the vBulletin Message board and adds CMS and Blogging applications on top. The serviceable-if-benign blogging app is not new to vBulletin but the CMS is new as of late last year. vBulletin's message board is about as good as it gets in modern day commercial products of its kind. Its main competitor is probably Invision Power Board, which has also been around a long time and which I have used in a very limited capacity. On balance I find that the two products' strengths and weaknesses offset each other, and that they are basically equals.
If vBulletin's message board app is a leader in its realm then the Content Management System is not. How this product was released under the name of "Gold" baffles me, and bafflement reflux-redux arises from the fact that the vBulletin CMS was released at all when any number of freeware competitors are far more stable and easily superior to this pre-alpha prototype. The vBulletin CMS suite has every bug in the jungle flying out of it, it ships with essentially zero documentation, and if development continues at the rate it seems to have progressed up until now then the vBulletin CMS will not be competitive with freeware products until at least 2014. 9 months after its release I can find not a single web site on this great Internet that uses the vBulletin CMS in a substantive way, not even vBulletin itself. And yet I find myself attracted to the vBulletin CMS. The heirarchy of sections and categories makes great sense for a magazine project like The Etude in which each issue has content within common categories. I populated sections with year and month and under each monthly issue I filled in content from the various categories common to the magazine: World of Music, Questions and Answers, Interviews, etc. It made sense! This straightforward heirarchy makes more sense to me than Joomla's file-cabinet system which (for now) lacks sub-categories and sub-sections. The beta version of Joomla supports some sort of sub-category arrangement but I doubt it will make sense for this project. Movable Type, for its slow-poke 2002-vintage clumsiness, is on target with allowing the sections and file system to be set up any way you want. My long-time use of and familiarity with Movable Type makes it hard for me not to favor, especially after mastering a heretoforeunimaginable MT>G2 connection!
I have lurched around numerous other CMSes, but there is no need (save for buzzword compliance) to name them all at this point.
On the other hand I find myself thinking, why don't I just use them all? I could use one CMS to share content from the World of Music sections of The Etude, another to share substantive interviews and musicological content, and another for teaching-related content. When I had this eureka moment I snapped up some surprisingly-available domain names with the intent of housing selected categories of content from these magazines on each site. Of course, this stroke of genius failed to account for the exponential increase in the amount of work involved, with untold expenses of time spent learning the idiosyncracies of these various CMSes.
So, I don't kow where to go next with this, but I might just stick with Movable Type for now while exploring other CMSes and populating them with Etude Magazine content.
For me, at least... Or maybe not at all. The 100th entry posted to The Etude Magazine section just went up: Musical Items from January, 1906. I have an abiding interest in these lists of ephemera from the world of music. I love these lists for their potential to raise obscurities from their shelter. I have cleaned up my scanning and OCR-processing a lot since I started this project, with the biggest leap coming from the purchase of ABBYY's Finereader software. Some of the stories scanned earlier contain obvious errors, but the editing process has been considerably improved since moving to Finereader. If I had any product suggestions for Finereader it would be for a more elegant dual-monitor arrangement. As it is, to take advantage of my 2-monitor setup, I need to spread the aplication across the screens, and this is pretty janky. A split screen or floating screen arrangement, with the scanned pages on the left and the text on the right, might be more usable. As it is, though, I find myself using Word independent of Finereader's text editing screens -- this is because Finereader seems able to use the MS Word custom dictionary but Finereader does not seem to sync with it. Meaning, if I tell Finereader to add a word to the dictionary it does so, but evidently it adds it to a Finereader dictionary? Maybe I am missing something but the words that I "Add to dictionary" in Finereader are still underlined as misspelled in Word. So the use of the MS Word Custom dictionary in Finereader is only partly useful. As for the dual monitor and other vagaries, I, for one, need to increase the page sizes to 500% to make them adequately readable, and this causes troubles in jumping around when I scroll one window. In fact, the mousewheel seems to be a pest to Finereader. In some contexts simply touching it causes the focus to jump from the bottom of a page to the top of the previous page, which can be incredibly aggravating. Maybe the fact that I have the zoom set to 500% is to blame. Whatever the case, I can't complain. Like any piece of software I learn to work with its idiosyncracies. It's all good, though, and the process is not so important as the content, which brings new satisfaction to me with every story posted. I have mixed feelings about leaving typographical errors as they appear in the magazine. I have taken to adding the customary (sic) after an obvious typo, but is not the point of digitizing old text at least partly to make it fluid again, and to take control of it in the digital way? It's as if leaving typos in these old stories is poking fun at the old editors and the old way of copy-editing, where typos were like blemishes. Typos today are easily fixed, and the once expensive infrastructure behind proofreading and editing copy is largely vacated. For now I shall leave the typos, but I might change direction with this later.
Just saying hi, mostly to myself, as I am probably the only live human whose eyes have crossed these web pages. I have not had the time needed to focus on this part of my web universe. Piano playing, studying, learning, and formulating coherent thoughts on the matter are all time-consuming pursuits. Part of my inspiration for creating this site was to document the hive of mental machinations that underlie the act of playing piano. So much code and mechanical translation, converting dots into acts and acts into sounds, the results themselves not even final.
Over on one of my other web sites I recently quoted Julian Jaynes on this matter:
“Here a complex array of various tasks is accomplished all at once with scarcely any consciousness of them whatever: two different lines of near hieroglyphics to be read at once, the right hand guided to one and the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to various tasks, the fingering solving various motor problems without any awareness, and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or sixteenth notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three beats to a measure while the other plays four, while the feet are softening or slurring or holding various other notes.”
Jaynes used the pianist as an example, to illustrate the difference between consciousness and awareness. I think it is generally cliché for non-musicians to use musical metaphors, but in this case I can accept that that the internals of piano-playing open a window into understanding what consciousness is. As can other acts performed most successfully without the intrusion of awareness.
After a few false starts I am up and running with a copy of FineReader Pro 10, which I am using to scan full issues of The Etude Music Magazine and convert them to text. FineReader is by far the best OCR software I have yet used, though my experience is relatively limited. Until now I had mostly used the built-in OCR funcitonality of Windows Scanning software, a program of limited functionality which nevertheless fit the bill for my initial plan: to scan an article or two a week and convert them to text. The more I did this, though, the more interesting it became to me, and I realized that if I am going to do this at all I might as well pull out the stops and do it the best I can.
My plan remains essentially the same: to scan and share content related to piano music, pianists, composers, and the general world of music, including commentary and extra links to try and bring this 100+ year old content up to date. I maintain an abiding interest in the more ephemeral portions of content from these magazines, including the various departments of short items which I group under the "World of Music." I do not expect to make complete issues of The Etude available at this time but nothing should stop me from doing so, and I have changed my mind about this project several times already. I do not expect to make the section of sheet music available at this time. The reason for this is that I simply do not find that material to be very interesting, and I shall save myself the time of scanning it.
This is a personal endeavor I have desired to do for years now, as my large collection of Etude Magazines has moldered away on my shelves. This week I took an additional measure of buying plastic polybags for storage of the magazines, because I find that the more I handle some of these magazines the more rapidly they fall to shreds, and falling-out pages and such make shelving in my available space hazardous to the integrity of the magazines.
