Ferdinand Ries, and Announcement

I have been blogging since April 2009. Over sixteen years. I started it with the intention of writing about the things I was doing and the things I needed to vent about at the time.

As the title suggests, it was never my intention that anyone should actually read anything I wrote. The point of venting is to say it, not start a discussion about it. I've only ever seen a handful of blogs with extensive comments sections, and those were functioning as a kind of forum where the moderator / blogger set that day's subject.

I've been trying to follow a two-a-week schedule for most of the time. Regular readers will have noticed the occasional lapses, followed by bursts of catch-up posting. This is often caused by my falling into the rabbit-hole of a multiple-post long-form essay. I'm not going to do those anymore, and I'm going to switch to once-a-week, and something simple. With the occasional bit of personal trivia.

When I was working, the insanities of the time affected me, if only slightly, and I had to make some kind of sense of what was happening. Now I'm not working, I don't have to, but it's a habit I haven't shaken yet, and I've been feeling it's a waste of time and energy. The Sophons arrived in the mid-1990's and have been messing with our politics and culture ever since, and so much of it is second-rate trend following that it's not worth the effort.

As opposed to the music of Ferdinand Ries, who started as a young virtuoso and a pupil of Beethoven, who said of him "he copies me too much", conducted the first performance of the Master's Ninth Symphony and wrote lot of perfectly pleasant music during a long and seemingly well-lived life.

I streamed quite a bit via Qobuz, and then took the plunge, getting a couple of CDs from Foyles: a volume of string quartets and the flute quartets.

Warmly recommended.