About The Etude Magazine Web Site
This is my ongoing project in which I digitize my collection of "The Etude Music Magazine", scanning the pages and converting them to text with OCR software. For the most part I share what I think are the most interesting and substantive stories from these magazines but if I'm feeling energized I'll post the complete content of an issue. A lot of great stuff has risen up from these pages since I started the project in early 2010, and I hope that you find interesting things here.
The Etude Music Magazine was published by Theodore Presser from 1883 to 1957. All content is from my personal collection of these magazines. I have hundreds of these magazines but my collection is far from complete and I doubt it will ever comprise every single issue.
I scanned the pages and converted the articles to text using OCR software. OCR software does a pretty amazing job of converting scanned images to digital text but I nevertheless must do follow-up editing and clean-up after the conversion. I do not expect these texts to be 100% letter-perfect but I make a genuine effort to make them as accurate as I can. Original typos are noted with (sic).
I am a pianist-composer, so most of the content chosen will probably be related to pianists, piano music, and composers. I also have an abiding interest in the "World of Music" content which makes mentions of notable and ephemeral musical events of the day. I share content of interest to me and which I hope will interest others.
The OCR software sometimes does unpredictable and amusing things. The words "composition" and "composer" appear frequently in the pages of "The Etude", and the OCR software often translates those words as "corn position" and "corn poser" respectively, which recently resulted in me having to edit these strangely provocative sentences: "I showed the corn position to Mr. Ben Davies, and he was greatly pleased with it" and "now all the corn posers are writing song-cycles". Those sentences almost appeared in the Three English Women Composers story from April, 1902. Another OCR gaffe comes from a story about Liszt, in which the author appears to have performed the Bach-Liszt Prelude Crud Fugue in A Minor. I point out these examples as a pre-emptive mea culpa in the event that similarly strange OCR snafus slip through.
In most cases images can be clicked on to see a larger version. Content on the top page appears in the order posted. Other listings, such as Categories and Monthly Archives, provide a more-or-less chronological listing of magazine content as it was published decades ago, with the later stories first. I also have a large gallery of Etude Magazine cover images. Each story contains a small image of the cover from the edition in which it appeared, and clicking that small image will take you to a larger version with links to all content I have from that issue.
Who am I? My other web projects include Sorabji.com, the Payphone Project, Wordswarm Dictionary Server, The Big Pictures, and lots of other things that you will find by wandering around my web sites. You can contact me HERE.