Tagged by the dog

Matthew Guerrieri has tagged me with the following meme seeking five blogs that "make you think":

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

In his tag, he expects me to seed the classical blog world, a large expectation given the superb but small audience here. But I'm game, and will stick to music blogs, although it's hard not to mention Crooked Timber, Ron Silliman's poetry and poetics blog, Debra Solomon's margins-of-the-edible culiblog, or SFMike's Civic Center (a photo blog of one of my favorite cities), all blogs outside the music world that somehow do wonders for my thinking about music (and then there are all those classics and anthopology blogs...). But Matthew wants seed capital among the music blogs, and the bloggers that get me thinking most are usually those whose work is most different from my own, so my list includes not a single blog from my own blogroll. Here goes, five thought-provoking blogs:

I'm obliged to include Sound & Fury, a blog by A.C. Douglas, with whom I agree on next-to-nothing (i.e. he's a perfect wagnerite, I'm the wagnerite who thinks Richy took a wrong turn after Die Feen). But heck, nothing clears up your own viewpoint better than a healthy disagreement among curmudgeons.

A View From the Podium is conductor Kenneth Woods' blog. It's specially interesting when he discusses repertoire that he's currently preparing

Nico Muhly, a composer who has an admirably anxiety-free way with connecting to musical worlds both older and more pop than our own.

Mixed Meters, by David Ocker, a recovered virtuoso with some real insight into the musical politics that too often gets in the way of making music.

Darcy James Argue blogs about a new music world parallel to my own, and he's also a pynchonite, which is a fine thing.