Music Blog Overload

I've been reading a few music blogs lately and they make me feel so lame. Here I am with a degree in music history and performance and I have absolutely NO idea what some of them are talking about. I feel SO out of the loop.

Somehow these bloggers seem to have enough time to read a multitude of lengthy articles and blogs online and then formulate an incredibly well-formed blog post discussing their take on all the ideas of said articles and blogs. Either they have a lot of time or they are very fast readers/thinkers/writers. Maybe both. I also tend to forget that I'm reading many entries that were written over time as if they were posted all at once. However, some of these folks post every day.

Anyhow, they're really plugged in to the musical "now" in a way that I am not (and never have been) but I sort of wish I could be. I guess they have a reason to be plugged in -- many of them are arts journalists or working composers who have their fingers on the musical pulse of the moment...but it seems like they spend oh-so-many hours at the computer reading, thinking, writing and linking in a way that makes my repetitive strain injuries ache sympathetically.

It also seems like they spend countless hours listening to recordings and compiling giant mental archives of musical trivia.

It amazes me.

BUT, I did glean one bit of solid amusement from my blog reading. I learned about the last part of the second movement of Haydn's Symphony no.93, wherein you will find a very good bassoon fart joke. The program notes inserted in the Royal Concertgebouw/Harnoncourt recording we have in the library describe it thusly (my boldface):

The work is not wanting in the way of "experiments", as the frightfully irritating fortissimo bassoon outburst near the end of the slow movement attests to, apparently entering half a measure too soon.*

Brilliant. I giggled through the entire movement in anticipation of hearing this most frightfully irritating moment, and I've got to say, it was a little anticlimactic on that recording. However, on another recording (Cleveland under Szell) it is MIGHTY. I had tears in my eyes.

And now my hands are done. I would link to the blogs I've been reading but that just sounds like not much fun. So, the end. :)

*(notes by Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski and translated from the German by Matthew Harris)