Better Websites

The good thing about an active blog is that when it is fed enough interesting and new material some readers may actually feel invited to come back again, and sometimes at regular intervals: like a weekly date at a cafe or donuts and the daily newspaper (remember the daily paper? remember donuts?). Composers' websites, on the other hand, tend to be fixed points, sources of reference materials that one visits once and returns only in a programming emergency. There are a few dedicated composer websites out their with the professional panache to actually serve as a marketing tool, but they are rare. Those colleagues who have been able to combine a blog with their website, for some one-stop musical-philosophical shopping, seem to be on the right track.

As for myself, I'm not yet on the right track: my website is not good, being neither attractive enough to get by on looks alone nor interesting enough to get by on smarts and contents. The fact that my rights organization, GEMA, makes it all expensive to place sounds on the site is a major problem (although I have begun to do a better job of putting scores online). And this blog is, well, what it is, and I haven't even managed to make a proper back-up of all 866 (eight-hundred and sixty-six) (!) posts to-date. Ideally, Ithinks, I'd like to integrate website and blog into something more composerly, a piece in its own right, if you will, and one that rewards visiting and revisiting and -- hopefully -- more performances of my music. I'm somewhat encouraged in this idea by my current reading of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, which -- or so I'm told -- is a species of hyper-novel, and welcome news that experimental literature has not gone the way of the Dodo and the 20th century and the nickel cigar.