Welcome to Musicuratum — a website, begun in the middle of 2012 and based (also while on hiatus) for a decade in Amsterdam, now located in Madrid, though it is written by one whose native tongue is English, joined with pages on Youtube, Soundcloud, and Spotify.
On all of them the aim is to draw attention to a diverse group of musicians, singers, composers, and the like. While the criterion for featuring them is unabashedly my personal preference, perhaps others, encountering them in the expository notices or the essays in these pages, will be filled with a similar enthusiasm.
The website as now formatted does require some explanation, all the more, since this explanatory text itself is accessed only via the fourth section on the front page. Briefly: earlier the mode of presentation common amongst the blogs, with a website’s latest postings at the top of the first page, marking a path to older stragglers (if the writers are more prolific), seemed quite adequate to me, and throughout a succession of “themes,” as the jargon designates the website formats, I opted for it; but recently, disaffected by the crawl with which the website had been loading, while beginning to feel some new graphic arrangement for the whole thing was in order, the idea of a format akin to a magazine’s appealed to me more and more, with not so uniform a front page, while the older entries might be reached not by laborious scrolling backwards from there, but solely as listed elsewhere, or by using the search function to locate them — in any case, interested readers would know how to find those pieces. (By now some degree of competence with the structures of a website can be generally assumed. Who any longer really may deem himself a neophyte in these matters?) And further, configuring this website’s front page anew in the shape of a magazine, opens room on it for works of music themselves. Thus the raison d’être of this entire project, too often honoured in the breach, could once again be heeded and given an eminent place. About the choice of offerings, which will not likely remain fixed, I shall say merely that at present their manifold delights have been much in my ears and on my mind.
Concerning the “style” of this magazine format, saying less here will indeed say more. It should explain itself, and to my mind it seems to do so.
Curious readers will meet a number of sections on the front page, indicated with numerals in larger type. Excerpts from and links to this website’s original texts are provided in several of them. In the first section there is a link to the recent, synoptic statement written to introduce the Compendium of all the texts both from the Amsterdam years and the more recent ones done in Madrid. Likewise in the second: the text with which the whole project commenced again in the latter city, towards the end of the summer of 2022. With the third, the most recent post is featured. Full lists of and links to all the posts, and also the few incidental or auxiliary texts, can be accessed via the menu items in the fifth. Section six presents further excerpts of and links to the previous posts, arranged on the front page in descending order. At the end of this section I’ve placed a link to a page entitled “Worthwhile for Listening,” which assembles music and other sorts of commendable recordings.
Through sections seven and eight the sequence of texts continues. Section nine comprises links to the website’s bibliography and to a page of suggestions for further reading. (An earlier, more diffuse incarnation of the latter compilation has been retired.) With the tenth section the presentation concludes, paired with links to a contact form and to the pages of acknowledgements and the colophon.
In the eleventh and last section I’ve placed two menus entitled “Books” and “Documents.” Here are paths to the texts published on this website during its two phases, in a few different compilations; readers may prefer to read these as virtual books or simply as PDF documents, and through either channel they are available for downloading. For consultation on this website only, finally, an Album is offered likewise: it is a set of excerpt-books stemming from my reading, which touch the project’s concerns from a number of sides.
Near the bottom of the front page is a subscription form. Completing the ensemble, I have included a wondrous poem which bears thinking on.
Back towards the top of the page, on the right-hand side, under the links to this website’s pages on the main music platforms, one finds a row of what one might take to be proper names — and indeed each designates a different website format. Advances in the computer technology, as exasperating as they often can be, do also at times provide some benefits, and of these the possibility of cladding a website in more than one way is an option freely utilised here. Whether with this option less is also more, remains for me an open question; but regardless, it can yield results of the kind I find nearly irresistible, all the more so, since the work such multiplications of design require is relatively little, certainly by comparison to an earlier imperfect foray in this direction, under the name of Musicuratum LP: Large Print, long since retired, which did indeed demand too much attention from me. But that is all a bygone matter, not worth ruminating over. How interesting and even unexpected by contrast are the surprises the variations amongst these several “themes” may offer, singly, together, in concord and/or counterpoint. — Further exploration of them remains in visitors’ hands. (To do so may not be possible with some Internet browsers, and could require adjustments of the settings on others. On the one I mainly use this option works faultlessly.)
The website garbed in this “theme” is intended as a variant to the primary one, to accentuate certain aspects, or simply to please or to relieve some eyes better than might the others. Options to switch between the themes are provided on this one as well, though readers may have to hunt a bit to locate them. If, of course, the Internet browser in use permits it, which may not hold true of all.
A word about embedded items. While looking over the articles, every so often readers might notice that some of the visual or audio recordings which I had included initially, subsequently have been removed by their makers (or else by the sites which hosted their work). Of course, over these decisions I have no influence, but for my part, generally I’ve let the players stand as empty shells, if only because as such they’d remind one how fleeting even music itself can be, sometimes.