Pickling an assessment

A long time ago, I was climbing the theory half of a ladder that lead to the first Royal Conservatory of Music-issued certificate that would assure anyone interested that the receiver of said certificate did not suck at piano … much.

To this day I'm still a bit fuzzy on how history falls under theory, but I have no legitimate complaint; history was my preference, the alternative being harmony, and considering that I have only ever been capable of talking harmony by waving my hands around like a seagull flaps its wings toward pieces of bread, you might guess that harmony wasn't my thing.

History exams always come with a couple long-answer questions, and all it takes to score full marks is to write down the passage from where that question appears. So if you were asked to discuss the transition from obtuse counterpoint to a more listenable homophonic texture in the sacred music of the Catholic Church, you would fetch the entire passage from memory, and write it down verbatim.

It was, in many ways, easy mode. Or not so easy mode, if you didn't have the inclination to memorize. But I was taught well: every week I had to "discuss" what was most likely a past exam question for homework, and my tutor would call me out if I had been lazy and skipped on some details to save time (and my wrist).

For you see, he had memorized the book.

So I made out okay in history, but now I have a problem. An illness, if you will. It turns out that this whole exercise was mildly habit forming, and whenever I come across certain pieces of music, I can and will write lots and lots of stuff.

Recently, prompted by a couple additions to my bookshelf, I've begun to consider the tedium of wading through a text dump written by a crazed former music student, the effort not unlike trying to describe my obsession de jure to a deaf person. So I thought, perhaps it would make sense if I were to space things out over several entries. But then I was stricken with a terrible epiphany:

Is that not like episodic blogging?

Well not really, now that I've stuck my head in a paper bag for a minute.

It would be if I were to write as I go on the first pass, but then it wouldn't matter if the UTF-8 avalanche came piecemeal or not. I don't intend on writing assessments on what would amount to a twitter time scale. No, I'd want to be satisifed with my perspective of an album or DVD in its entirety before going barking mad. To the world, that is.

Since calling it track-by-track, or chapter-by-chapter is kind of boring, and "trackasodic" is the kind of thinking that leads to horrifying new words like "blog," I propose that this posting style instead be called a "serial music review." I suppose that there is some irony in that.

My concern is, I'm not sure how it would be received by the vanishingly small subset of my vanishingly small readership that actually finds this audio to text conversion content edifying.

It's not like I haven't tried it before, but that was a one-off, content transfer occasion from when I tried to convince some people over e-mail that Exodus wasn't that bad, a stance that I still stand by. And that was really out of fear that GMail would roll over and take the whole exchange with it; I did not, do not, expect anyone to actually read four paragraphs as to why Animato rules.

Which … kind of defeats the purpose. Let us overlook that.

So what say you two, on a good day, and I hope it's a good day. If not, what say you? Maybe I'm just making a mountain out of a molehill, but feel free to tell me that too.

P.S.

By now it's common knowledge that I have taken out something of a restraining order on the word "blog," and I try to limit any contact with the thing to two weekends a month.