Week 3 activity, 1/21

Notable last week:

• my first substantive interview, with Vijay Iyer (he responded to it briefly offsite to say he’d respond to it fully soon). It’s notable for me because it more or less set the template for how all future such interviews will go—what material from each musician, scholar, or musician/scholar (Vijay’s category) I will process, and how and why; how long that’s likely to take (3-4 half-days); and how this project’s new way of doing such research/interviews differs from how I’ve worked before (more self-disclosure and presence, more sharing of my process and background thinking/notes, agendas, personal, creative, intellectual);
• a review of a recent Ganelin concert on DVD (my 4th CD review on-site of many more to come); Leo Feigin checked in, also offsite, and is sending me extensive textual material to go with the 12 CDs of early ‘80s Ganelin and other Russian musicians I got off leorecords.com. I’ll get back to that area after I get and go through Leo’s material and talk to him and others further;
• Ursel Schlicht checked in, with her interesting work with her group Ex Tempore, now on my To-Do list, and waiting on her texts and CD to come in;
• finally, I had one surprising red flag about the site’s automatic email notification function (thought I had that taken care of). One person said he was getting notified whenever I did my private operations, such as working on my To-Do list, or uploading files onto the site. Others I asked said this wasn’t happening to them, so I’m assuming he might have been the only one, for reasons I think I now understand and have fixed.

I don’t want this virtual convention of ours to function like a typical listserv, where you get a lot of emails you have no interest in—but I do want it to be easy for the different interested parties to move in and out of as the project pertains to or interests them. I’m assuming that will usually be when I’m focused on them, which will happen for one or two people a week, give or take, for the duration of the project.

Next week I will be busy with other things, so I don’t expect to do much in NewOldMusic until the week after that again. I have a pile of material to get through, more coming in...and after I go through everyone who’s responded, I will start in on those who haven’t. I will write them up whether they do or not, but I do expect some of them to jump in from their lurk or absence when I start writing them up and invite them to influence the way I do so.
In conclusion, I decided to lose the list of the site’s activities I’ve been ending these Sunday entries with. These notes are quite enough...