Yeah, that didn't quite happen, did it?
When I said that "three more posts... (would) feel like a rather heroic undertaking", I hadn't really considered that I might not end up posting again at all before the end of the year. Of the various things I had lined up, I knew that most of them were not going to get done in December; but I had fully intended to do another retrospective, and in the event it simply didn't get done because we were away visiting people, and I didn't really get any time to myself, and... when it came down to it, I couldn't justify making a priority of it, since hardly anyone read last year's post anyway ;-) This sort of granular self-analysis serves some purpose for me, but is of (understandably) limited interest to practically everyone else.
Still... twenty-eight months after I resumed posting in earnest, it does feel worthwhile to ask some questions about the extent (if any) to which all this is working. I had been away for an awfully long time, more than long enough to drop out of most readers' memories - and in the interim, Blogger itself had been relegated to "still active, but only just" status; would I be able to reclaim a decent proportion of my former readership, just by persistently plugging away?
The answer to that is a resounding "No!" as it turns out. Many former readers never found their way back - one can hardly blame them - and although a few new readers have managed to stumble across the blog, somehow or other, it seems obvious that many (if not most) of the potential readers for this kind of material just don't know that we exist. My skills, such as they are, do not extend to knowing what to do about this, so... up till now I have done nothing about it whatsoever. But on the whole the page hits for the blog during 2024 have been slightly down on where they were in 2023, which may or may not mean that I am doing something wrong, but certainly don't suggest that I am getting too much right.
Then again, I never had the slightest intention of trying to make any money out of this anyway, so it's always been the case that as long as I felt it was of some value to me, I would keep doing it. If it also proves valuable to others, however few, so much the better. [Of course it's always also been the case that it had to be good enough for the maestro, if he deigned to read it; but I think it's safe to say he doesn't, any more. That actually doesn't change things, though: it still has to be good enough for him, from my point of view.]
So much for looking back. In terms of going forward: am I just going to carry on in the same vein, changing nothing? I'm really not sure yet. It feels as of some tweaks and adjustments are called for - but, lacking any real clues as to how to make them, I may very well just carry on regardless, yes... for the most part, anyway. The glacial pace at which I proceed with long-form analysis doesn't seem to be working very well at all: it's well over a year since I first thought about examining Ensemble Montaigne (Bau 4) 2013, but that entailed gaining a greater degree of familiarity with several prior works from B's catalogue, and I am still miles away from being able to undertake a full-form analysis. In the meantime, the length between instalments is not helping me either, as my memory is (alas) not quite what it was, and new knowledge does not always get retained these days, so working at such a slow pace is counter-productive to me, as well as possibly* being maddeningly frustrating to the reader. This aspect of what I do, at any rate, must surely be revised: after all, I now have a similar problem with regard to Comp. 27, which I still want to examine properly after it was unveiled at the BBC Proms last August; at my recent rate of progress, I might be ready to look at that in detail round about 2030, if I'm lucky. That just isn't acceptable to me. I need to find a different approach.
The subject of the Promenade concert raises another question, too. It was available online for a month or so after it was broadcast, but anyone who missed it at the time will not still be able to hear it now. If I write about it, without also posting a link to a sound file, is that worth doing at all? The greater relevance of this question is to the long-delayed matter of the tape collection, which I am always going to get around to, one of these days... what value if I do, when I am not able to provide downloads for any such recordings which I do, finally, hear? Will there be any point in writing about them? If there isn't, will there be any use to my doing it in the first place..? and so on and so forth.
I could of course chew my head up with questions like this, and in the past have done exactly that, but I try not to any more. So, all I can say for the time being is that I will still carry on blogging, even if I am not yet sure to what extent I will be blogging in the same manner as before. It does, after all, continue to be of use to me, and if anyone else does derive any benefit from it... I'm glad! Despite the exposure at the Proms, we seem to be farther than ever from a world where many people take time over things requiring their detailed attention; but we don't have to be fatalistic about that. There are some people out there who might enjoy what I do here - what we do, when we do it - if they only knew of the blog's existence, so if anyone reading this has friends with an interest in creative music generally, and all things Braxtonian in particular... do please tell them :-D
* Possibly - I mean, is it? Does anyone expect anything different from me, these days..?
