You can think of this page as an unofficial first post, written, with my usual sense of punctuality, three years late.
I started this site in 2009, and it began, as you might have already guessed, as a personal blog. From around 2014, it began to evolve into an occasional opinion column and a link blog. (No surprise, Daring Fireball, which follows this exact model, is one of my daily reads.) I’ve removed most of the early posts, since they’re not really relevant to what I’m doing today, but the slow change to the current form means that the site never really launched so much as it appeared.
The main topic of this blog is music, though I want to leave myself room to cover other areas. (That’s part of why I haven’t come up with a fitting name for the site.) There’s plenty of good music writing around, but some of it—a lot of classical music writing in particular—suffers from one of two opposing problems:
- it assumes that the listener is already an expert, or at least has considerable knowledge, or
- it simplifies things so much they border on being untrue
Both of those styles have their place, but they’re not what I’m interested in doing. To a potential reader who doesn’t know much about classical music, one is a barbed wire fence, the other a playpen.
I think that there’s room for something else. (In fact, I know there is.) This blog assumes, and will always assume, that readers have no existing knowledge of classical music. It also assumes that readers are intelligent and curious. I don’t always post about music, but when I do, my hope is that what I write will be interesting no matter your level of expertise.
If you’d like to get in touch, the best way is via Twitter. You’ll find me @BrenFinan.