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.
Recently in Etude Magazine Category
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"
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.
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.
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.
The Etude Cover Gallery now shows 365 items, starting with the earliest cover from my collection -- January, 1901 -- and ending with the December, 1955 issue.
I did not expect to make such a concerted project of the covers, but the more I looked at them the more appealing they became to me. It reminded me of LP records and how generously endowed some were with large poster-size prints and artwork. Compact Discs, by comparison, generally offer impossible-to-read booklets if they provide any supplementary material at all.
These Etude Magazine covers seem lavish compared to modern products, though the quality of the Etude covers as art took a hit starting with the April, 1951 cover, featuring a new logo and a garish banner across the top.
An interesting cover I wanted to share appeared on the August, 1945 edition. Signed by an artist named Morgan this strange cover features an audience of insects enjoying the performance of a violin/cello cricket duo. Or are these performers another type of insect? My entymology is not so sharp as my other skills, but whatever these little creatures are they found their stage on a mushroom and are seen here making music in a thicket.
There is no information about this cover within the pages of The Etude, so the only extra detail I can glean is that artist's name is "Morgan" -- at least I think that's what the signature in the lower-right corner says.
