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| About Pianonoise |
| last updated 4/10/08 |
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Pianonoise is the creation of Michael Hammer, pianist, church organist, teacher, composer, and amateur ping-pong enthusiast, who just happens to be his own Web maestro as well, and all content related catastrophes are the exclusive intellectual property of same. That's how the original "about" page read at the time of Pianonoise's creation, six years ago. Since then, Pianonoise has sprawled like an unplanned urban area to include around 75 pages of writings, musical and unmusical, information, irreverance, irrelevance, and at least 100 recordings of piano and organ music--and that is only what is currently archived. What is on Pianonoise? Articles on composers, musical information, and just plain musical goofiness. In whatever order I was in the mood for at the time. It is, admittedly, a strange combination of public service, entertainment, and self-indulgence, like most enterprises on the web which are not simply there for commerce. My apologies in advance for not being straight-laced enough to seem like a professional. In 2008, the site is undergoing a thorough renovation. Like a mansion which had grown so big the proprietor hadn't visited several of the rooms in a while, I had forgotten half of what was on the site. So, in case you are wondering what that purple bar near the top of the page is for, it houses a navigation bar on every page save the first three, and each page has been given a number (and forward and back arrows) so that, if you want, you can scroll through the entire site and be assured of not missing anything. The original purpose of that little function was for me, so I can check on the entire site and not leave anything unfixed or un-updated. What is the site good for? It is a chance to see a musical artist at work, thinking, planning, playing, composing, and concertizing--or at least it will be when the site is better organized. I tend to work in spurts and to go off in several directions. If I'm busy as a composer, or a performer, you may not hear from me for a while. Then suddenly, a spurt of new growth. I've tried to live with that. I hope you can too. You are welcome to come back often. And bring your questions. More about Pianonoise than you wanted to know Pianonoise gets updated once a month--officially. What really happens is that I add to various parts of it, or change them, whenever I get around to it. At the top of the home page is a banner with a picture that is changed every month or two, and a quotation of the month. The views represented in that citation may or may not square with my own, but I found it interesting enough to post. I'm kind of funny that way. Usually when I write an essay, I find myself arguing pretty vociferously for the opposition before finally zeroing in on what seems to me to be the essential argument. This takes a while. If you'd just rather have a rant in a nutshell you probably want to avoid my blog, but the quotations should be right up your alley. A while back, a friend of mine gave me a book of quotations on music which I used to use to furnish some of the quotes that now adorn the banners on every page of the site. These days they usually come from something I've read recently. Quotes that start out on the home page are starting to find their way to the other 70-odd pages in Pianonoise to be archived. Sometimes they bear a rather amusing relationship to what is on the rest of the page. I should mention I have also been accused of having a very dry sense of humor. This does not translate very well through a written web page, any more than spilling a very dry martini on your computer will improve the efficiency of your processor (whatever it may think). The Noise is basically my blog. I tend to write newspaper column sized entries, and publish them at the beginning of each month. While most of the site deals with music, the noise frequently does not. It is one of the ways I have confounded search engines for years. Last year I experimented with short blogs every couple of days, but I find it most worthwhile to talk about a few things, consider them in some depth, and leave it up for a while so you can read it whenever you have time. I figure if it is worth saying it is worth taking the time to say with some consideration, as opposed to just spouting my opinion about something and assuming you are idiots if you don't agree. But then, it takes awhile to write such verbal sojourns, and is much easier to go on somebody's chat page and be nasty in a few misspelled lines of all caps. This kind of thing is not up to code on Pianonoise. If you want to send me a rant, you'll have to do it by email. Thoughtful, considerate replies are welcome, too, by the way! The MP3 files on this site are all recordings of the webmaestro himself, and have been recorded in a variety of circumstances and settings. If some of them sound like they were recorded in the shower, my apologies. Some of them were recorded by professionals from concert performances, some in recording studios, and others on home equipment in my living room or the sanctuary of my church or someplace like that by some idiot who doesn't know a thing about microphone placement (that would be me). Those funny numbers at the ends of the file names (eg, composer_name.Title_of_piece.funny_number) are actually catalog numbers. They allow every recording I post to have its own unique number in case I want to post another version of the same piece later on. I started with one in November 2004 and worked my way up. I'm currently just above 150. The number can give you some idea of how recently the recording was made. Or you can just check in the index and see when I posted it. The MP3 Index is supposed to contain every single full-fledged piece of music on the site. It may currently be missing a few, which is why I have on my to-do list the job of rectifying this. It still contains several hours worth of music, and over a hundred files, some of which, unfortunately, date from a time when I was violently out of practice (writing my doctoral thesis among other distractions), which is another one of those things that I've been meaning to fix. |