Some Useful, Interesting, and Unusual or Obscure Websites from Across the Internet
While I work my way through some books and write up reviews, to try and sate the voracious appetite of my audience of one I've put together in one place a bunch of favorite blogs, websites, resources, and so on from across the Internet. Their topics range wildly from music to classic cars and their prominence on the Internet ranges from you-may've-heard-of-this-already to there's-no-possible-way-you've-heard-of-this. Enjoy!
For the purposes of this post, the format will be, generally, like so: a header image will be accompanied by a link to the website in question. I will exposit a paragraph or two on the virtues of the website, and then we will be off to the next one. For the sake of nostalgia over the old "alfabet," I will be presenting it in alphabetical order.
Most of it is music, though.
This website is about one of the least well-known aspects of classical music: those composers of African descent. Let us remember, the African continent has its own wholly unique musical culture quite divorced originally from the European one and I expect that if you explore far enough you may still find it. African music retains a unique voice. Less known is African composers of "genuine" classical music within the mainstream European tradition.
To some extent, this website is about them. The link name refers to the Chevalier de Saint Georges, a man of talent who was, apparently, known as the "Black Mozart" or the "French Mozart"! The website has 52 composers, musicians, and composers either African or of African descent - besides Saint Georges, you can find pages on Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, William Grant Still, and others.
Meticulously researched, and accompanied by many a quality photograph, this website presents histories of various automobiles from across the world with a particular and natural focus on classic cars. At the top menu bar you can find those posts organized three ways - by type, by era, and by brand.
My own favorites come from Before World War II and The Post War Era. In my mind, the 50s will never be exceeded from a design and aesthetic standpoint: the Nash "Airflyte" models, the Hudson "Step-Down" cars (the Hornet most notable among them), the Studebaker... umm... the Studebakers ("First by far with a post-war car"), and, let us not forget, the immortal Citroën DS, which is my dream car.
I love just going through his blog and poring through them. This is the website of the film and television composer Bear McCreary, who is one of the most talented "new" composers working. You may know him as the man behind Battlestar Galactica, Da Vinci's Demons, The Walking Dead, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Or perhaps you're familiar thanks to Outlander, Black Sails, or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Or maybe you know better his more recent work: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Happy Death Day, or The Rebel in the Rye.
Whatever. He's brilliant. And his blog, for many of his movies and television shows, has posts on it, talking about his musical decision-making, regarding leitmotif, harmony, instrumentation, and arrangement. Does that sound dry? It isn't. McCreary's posts are reasonably-long, not heavy at all on incomprehensible musical terminology, and quite readable.
Since 1999, the lawyer Peter Gutmann has been writing about classical music. And, despite him having no formal training (if I remember correctly), he writes some of the most perceptive and intelligent classical music criticism. Is criticism an appropriate word? Perhaps. This is hardly scathing, biting work.
Gutmann provides an overview of the composer and his time, than the work as a whole, than each movement, goes through a couple major recordings from across the spectrum (sometimes further dividing into various 'styles of interpretation' as necessary) and wrapping up with a final paragraph and oft a listing of other recordings which he felt to be less significant or unique. As you go back earlier in time, posts generally decrease in length. Over the years Gutmann has greatly, greatly expanded his posts from the early days. He updates a couple times a year, and in recent years (the long posts) he will include a list of sources, and generally a good couple dozen of them, too!
His tastes are idiosyncratic in some way but intelligent: he cares little if the conductor does or doesn't bring "interpretive" touches to the score or not so long as the recording "lives." (My own description here.) That said, he does lean towards those conductors who bring unique interpretive touches to the score: Furtwängler, Mengelberg, and others are all firm favorites.
Besides the extensive Classical Classics section, there are also smaller sections on opera, D.W. Griffith, annotated discographies, and a few others.
This one will be especially interesting to those who are fond of the NES era. This website/blog by composer Neil Baldwin details the NES games he scored, both released and unreleased, going in to the background of it, some thoughts on writing the tunes, and providing notes on a few tunes.
Between these posts are various other interludes, some of them non-musical, others covering the development of his own software to write NES music. For those of you who are only interested in his notes on the music, Erik the Viking (1992, unreleased) was his last NES game. All beyond that is posts about the software project thing.
Don't believe the link: it's not called Game Boy World anymore. Jeremy Parish has unified his various gaming history projects with the title "Works".
This project - one of truly impressive, expansive, and, I would imagine, expensive scope - is explained like so:
Game Boy World [sic] is meant to be two things: One, a chronological index of all Game Boy titles released globally. And two, an in-depth exploration of those games contextualized within the history of the platform, of games, and of the times.
It has, thus far, made it to episode 106: Soreyuke!! Amida-kun, part of the ongoing 1990 series. Parish is truly dedicated - if you read the about page (which retains the original name Game Boy World) he will explain also that he has been photographing each game and filming it, as well. He has a {Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gamespite) to help fund him not just for Game Boy Works but for his other projects, NES Works and Super NES Works. Beyond the videos on his Youtube channel he also has books out for Game Boy Works which include written-up essays. Some (possibly most) are transcripts of the episodes, but for the earlier episodes and games, such as Final Fantasy Legend, are unique write-ups.
It is, in my opinion, the most impressive and my own favorite (though this may be my bias towards handheld gaming emerging) of a couple of game-by-game histories.
This online book is sort of a history of conducting in the recorded era through the early years of the 20th century, covering those conductors born from the 1850s to the 1880s. From the 1850s we have Arthur Nikisch; progressing from the 1860s onwards we find such notable and estimable conductors as Weingartner, Toscanini, Mengelberg, Koussevitsky, Stokowski, Furtwängler, and many, many more - several dozen conductors, in fact.
The writer Arthur Bloomfield also dives into surveying some of these conductors' recordings - of course, the length and amount is often reliant on how many recordings the conductor made and how well-known the conductor is. I have not yet managed to read all the way through the extensive post on Toscanini, for example. But if I so wanted to I could. Bloomfield is cheerfully informal, and it makes the book a joy to read.
Composer Alan Beggerow has since 2011 been posting his thoughts (musings, you could say) on various pieces of music. His posts generally are a short description (three paragraphs. I wonder if my idea of "short" has become skewed over the years.) of the circumstances of composition and overview, followed by descriptions of each movement, even including a little bit of sheet music for each one, and finally concluding with a recording of the work from his own YouTube channel.
While, naturally, most the posts are about the well-known composers, he doesn't stick to simply the most basic of basic repertoire. It's not just Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Tchaikovsky: there's also Sibelius, Bach, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Verdi, and others. You won't find yourself disinterested. But he also - rarely - dives into some more obscure composers: Franz Lachner, for example, a composer of such obscurity that five of his eight symphonies have never been recorded. If you scroll down far enough, you will find a listing of tags on his posts ordered according to quantity of posts per tag. This makes it easy, for example, to go to his eleven posts about C.P.E. Bach, or his two posts on Antonio Salieri.
I'll freely admit that this is the most specialized website I'm going to link, for the sole reason that I'm not linking a website, I'm linking a single page. It is, I believe, a lightly-edited college paper, of which some items were omitted. The name really tells you all you need to know. Examples of sheet music from Borodin's symphonies are included, but they're so small that it may be difficult to read. It is, nevertheless, a fascinating read.
Named for a paper newsletter which sporadically ran from 1994 to 1999, this still-updated website is a collection of articles by Adam Trionfo and Chris Federico about classic videogames, ranging from Klax to Wing War.
This one, I admit, I don't visit as often as some of the other websites on this list. Excepting an update from March this year, no new articles have been posted since 2016. Nevertheless, its content is valuable and interesting, and it is made all the more so because it covers gaming's very early years, the Atari 2600 era and early computer games.
Of all the websites here, this is my most recent discovery, which I found just a week or two ago. It is, simply put, and I quote: "A blog on the nature of note-taking." Posts are generally short and sweet, sometimes simply a posting of an article about note-taking.
However, a couple of posts inspired me to create for myself a "memdex" (memory + index), an index card-based catalog of, well, my things and my ideas and likely in the future various other things such as scraps of information that might be useful in the future. My own memdex remains a work in progress, but perhaps sometime this year, I'll do a post on it.
Posting since 2010, Bryan has been recording ("ripping" I believe may be the correct term) old 78s, putting the sides together, and posting them freely for the public to download and listen to. It is, of course, named for the 78s, which were made out of shellack. This was a far different material from the vinyl used for LPs and 45s, harder, stiffer, and easier to break. A side contained only five minutes of music, and that's assuming it's a full 12-inch 78.
His rips are all of classical music, ranging from Shostakovich to Hindemith to Brahms. There's rarer stuff, too: Florent Schmitt's String Trio, for example, or Ernest Bloch's String Quartet Nr. 3. All of it is recorded in fine fidelity - the acoustically-recorded ones of course suffer from the flaws of that method of recording, but some of them are surprisingly clear. Relatively speaking. On the other end of the spectrum, 78s made at the end of the 78s' lifespan are impressively clear and rival LPs. There is nothing quite like mastery of technology to bring about a high standard of quality. I've downloaded a couple of the rips myself and I have to say, I quite enjoy them.
So there you are. Having finished, I've thought of a few other other websites I'd wish I'd included. But no matter! I will save them for a future post: "Some More Useful, Interesting, and Unusual Websites from Across the Internet." Hopefully you enjoyed this post and have found a new website to follow and enjoy.
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