If content posting from The Etude seems to have stagnated here it is not for lack of activity behind the scenes. I have been exploring other Content Management Systems for the Etude project, as alternatives to my tried-and-true Movable Type, but I find the results of these experiments to be inconclusive. I was inspired to explore other solutions after blindly spending a lot of money on vBulletin Gold, which takes the vBulletin Message board and adds CMS and Blogging applications on top. The serviceable-if-benign blogging app is not new to vBulletin but the CMS is new as of late last year. vBulletin's message board is about as good as it gets in modern day commercial products of its kind. Its main competitor is probably Invision Power Board, which has also been around a long time and which I have used in a very limited capacity. On balance I find that the two products' strengths and weaknesses offset each other, and that they are basically equals.

If vBulletin's message board app is a leader in its realm then the Content Management System is not. How this product was released under the name of "Gold" baffles me, and bafflement reflux-redux arises from the fact that the vBulletin CMS was released at all when any number of freeware competitors are far more stable and easily superior to this pre-alpha prototype. The vBulletin CMS suite has every bug in the jungle flying out of it, it ships with essentially zero documentation, and if development continues at the rate it seems to have progressed up until now then the vBulletin CMS will not be competitive with freeware products until at least 2014. 9 months after its release I can find not a single web site on this great Internet that uses the vBulletin CMS in a substantive way, not even vBulletin itself. And yet I find myself attracted to the vBulletin CMS. The heirarchy of sections and categories makes great sense for a magazine project like The Etude in which each issue has content within common categories. I populated sections with year and month and under each monthly issue I filled in content from the various categories common to the magazine: World of Music, Questions and Answers, Interviews, etc. It made sense! This straightforward heirarchy makes more sense to me than Joomla's file-cabinet system which (for now) lacks sub-categories and sub-sections. The beta version of Joomla supports some sort of sub-category arrangement but I doubt it will make sense for this project. Movable Type, for its slow-poke 2002-vintage clumsiness, is on target with allowing the sections and file system to be set up any way you want. My long-time use of and familiarity with Movable Type makes it hard for me not to favor, especially after mastering a heretoforeunimaginable MT>G2 connection!

I have lurched around numerous other CMSes, but there is no need (save for buzzword compliance) to name them all at this point.

On the other hand I find myself thinking, why don't I just use them all? I could use one CMS to share content from the World of Music sections of The Etude, another to share substantive interviews and musicological content, and another for teaching-related content. When I had this eureka moment I snapped up some surprisingly-available domain names with the intent of housing selected categories of content from these magazines on each site. Of course, this stroke of genius failed to account for the exponential increase in the amount of work involved, with untold expenses of time spent learning the idiosyncracies of these various CMSes.

So, I don't kow where to go next with this, but I might just stick with Movable Type for now while exploring other CMSes and populating them with Etude Magazine content.

For me, at least... Or maybe not at all. The 100th entry posted to The Etude Magazine section just went up: Musical Items from January, 1906. I have an abiding interest in these lists of ephemera from the world of music. I love these lists for their potential to raise obscurities from their shelter. I have cleaned up my scanning and OCR-processing a lot since I started this project, with the biggest leap coming from the purchase of ABBYY's Finereader software. Some of the stories scanned earlier contain obvious errors, but the editing process has been considerably improved since moving to Finereader. If I had any product suggestions for Finereader it would be for a more elegant dual-monitor arrangement. As it is, to take advantage of my 2-monitor setup, I need to spread the aplication across the screens, and this is pretty janky. A split screen or floating screen arrangement, with the scanned pages on the left and the text on the right, might be more usable. As it is, though, I find myself using Word independent of Finereader's text editing screens -- this is because Finereader seems able to use the MS Word custom dictionary but Finereader does not seem to sync with it. Meaning, if I tell Finereader to add a word to the dictionary it does so, but evidently it adds it to a Finereader dictionary? Maybe I am missing something but the words that I "Add to dictionary" in Finereader are still underlined as misspelled in Word. So the use of the MS Word Custom dictionary in Finereader is only partly useful. As for the dual monitor and other vagaries, I, for one, need to increase the page sizes to 500% to make them adequately readable, and this causes troubles in jumping around when I scroll one window. In fact, the mousewheel seems to be a pest to Finereader. In some contexts simply touching it causes the focus to jump from the bottom of a page to the top of the previous page, which can be incredibly aggravating. Maybe the fact that I have the zoom set to 500% is to blame. Whatever the case, I can't complain. Like any piece of software I learn to work with its idiosyncracies. It's all good, though, and the process is not so important as the content, which brings new satisfaction to me with every story posted. I have mixed feelings about leaving typographical errors as they appear in the magazine. I have taken to adding the customary (sic) after an obvious typo, but is not the point of digitizing old text at least partly to make it fluid again, and to take control of it in the digital way? It's as if leaving typos in these old stories is poking fun at the old editors and the old way of copy-editing, where typos were like blemishes. Typos today are easily fixed, and the once expensive infrastructure behind proofreading and editing copy is largely vacated. For now I shall leave the typos, but I might change direction with this later.

Just saying hi, mostly to myself, as I am probably the only live human whose eyes have crossed these web pages. I have not had the time needed to focus on this part of my web universe. Piano playing, studying, learning, and formulating coherent thoughts on the matter are all time-consuming pursuits. Part of my inspiration for creating this site was to document the hive of mental machinations that underlie the act of playing piano. So much code and mechanical translation, converting dots into acts and acts into sounds, the results themselves not even final.

Over on one of my other web sites I recently quoted Julian Jaynes on this matter:

“Here a complex array of various tasks is accomplished all at once with scarcely any consciousness of them whatever: two different lines of near hieroglyphics to be read at once, the right hand guided to one and the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to various tasks, the fingering solving various motor problems without any awareness, and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or sixteenth notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three beats to a measure while the other plays four, while the feet are softening or slurring or holding various other notes.”

Jaynes used the pianist as an example, to illustrate the difference between consciousness and awareness. I think it is generally cliché for non-musicians to use musical metaphors, but in this case I can accept that that the internals of piano-playing open a window into understanding what consciousness is. As can other acts performed most successfully without the intrusion of awareness.

After a few false starts I am up and running with a copy of FineReader Pro 10, which I am using to scan full issues of The Etude Music Magazine and convert them to text. FineReader is by far the best OCR software I have yet used, though my experience is relatively limited. Until now I had mostly used the built-in OCR funcitonality of Windows Scanning software, a program of limited functionality which nevertheless fit the bill for my initial plan: to scan an article or two a week and convert them to text. The more I did this, though, the more interesting it became to me, and I realized that if I am going to do this at all I might as well pull out the stops and do it the best I can.

My plan remains essentially the same: to scan and share content related to piano music, pianists, composers, and the general world of music, including commentary and extra links to try and bring this 100+ year old content up to date. I maintain an abiding interest in the more ephemeral portions of content from these magazines, including the various departments of short items which I group under the "World of Music." I do not expect to make complete issues of The Etude available at this time but nothing should stop me from doing so, and I have changed my mind about this project several times already. I do not expect to make the section of sheet music available at this time. The reason for this is that I simply do not find that material to be very interesting, and I shall save myself the time of scanning it.

This is a personal endeavor I have desired to do for years now, as my large collection of Etude Magazines has moldered away on my shelves. This week I took an additional measure of buying plastic polybags for storage of the magazines, because I find that the more I handle some of these magazines the more rapidly they fall to shreds, and falling-out pages and such make shelving in my available space hazardous to the integrity of the magazines.

The Etude Cover Gallery now shows 365 items, starting with the earliest cover from my collection -- January, 1901 -- and ending with the December, 1955 issue.

I did not expect to make such a concerted project of the covers, but the more I looked at them the more appealing they became to me. It reminded me of LP records and how generously endowed some were with large poster-size prints and artwork. Compact Discs, by comparison, generally offer impossible-to-read booklets if they provide any supplementary material at all.

These Etude Magazine covers seem lavish compared to modern products, though the quality of the Etude covers as art took a hit starting with the April, 1951 cover, featuring a new logo and a garish banner across the top.

An interesting cover I wanted to share appeared on the August, 1945 edition. Signed by an artist named Morgan this strange cover features an audience of insects enjoying the performance of a violin/cello cricket duo. Or are these performers another type of insect? My entymology is not so sharp as my other skills, but whatever these little creatures are they found their stage on a mushroom and are seen here making music in a thicket.

There is no information about this cover within the pages of The Etude, so the only extra detail I can glean is that artist's name is "Morgan" -- at least I think that's what the signature in the lower-right corner says.

The November, 1930, issue of The Etude opens up an interesting "mystery", that is if mysteries truly exist in our time. The cover image is titled "Rubinstein Playing in Stassov's Home" and it was, according to the credit underneath the image, "Painted expressly for The Etude by Ossip de Perelma de Bisserie."

Ossip de Perelma (also known as "Ossip di Perelma", "Ossip Perelman", and other variations) was an established Russian painter known for his portraits of that country's czars. He left Russia in 1917. In this painting the artist returns to Russian subject matter, depicting the great pianist Anton Rubinstein playing at the home of Vladimir Stassov (also spelled Stasov). Stassov, seen lounging at the far right of the painting, was a highly influential music critic in Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The painting adorns the November, 1930, cover of The Etude, and depicts a soireé which would likely have taken place in the 1880s or 1890s. No additional information about this painting is included in the magazine.

Of less interest than the painting, however, is the painter's ultimate fate as recounted in an interesting story at SimplySarasota.com. Under the "Mysteries of Sarasota" heading is a story called Where did the Russian Count's Relatives Go?, which contains a brief summary of the artist's life followed by the strange absence of any relatives or friends to claim his body after his death. Six years after Perelma's death the funeral home finally located the artist's wife, and arrangements were made for a proper funeral service.

A minor historical footnote, perhaps, but a staid reminder that a measure of fame in one's public life is no guarantee of lasting public renown or memory.

It reminded me of an interesting project I read about at DesignObserver.com. In a story called Death's Bloom I read of an Oregon hospital which stored in its basement a number of metal canisters containing cremains of its patients. Documented by photographer David Maisel in Library of Dust, the canisters evolved over the years into mordantly colorful works of erosive art. The Etude cover artist for November, 1930, ultimately suffered no such ignominy, but had he been left in the lurch long enough he might have been buried as an unknown.

Similarly (and more relevant to piano music) one is reminded of the burial site of Scott Joplin, who died a pauper and was buried in a mass grave at St. Michael's Cemetery in Astoria. In the 1970s, when Joplin's reputation rose up from obscurity and he was given the credit he was due, the burial site was located and a formal plaque honoring Joplin's burial site was placed. Today it is common to see tokens of respect placed at the site, which draws a number of admirers and famous-grave-seekers to St. Michael's Cemetery.

Paul Harvey used to have a segment of his radio show called "Shop Talk" in which he talked about the radio and broadcasting business in which he spent most of his life. I am no Paul Harvey but I shall try the Shop Talk thing, since it seems to be on my mind so much while building this new web site.

I use Movable Type for text content, with Gallery2 for photo galleries like the Etude Cover Magazines and Old Advertisements. I've used Gallery2 for years now and will likely skip the impending update to Gallery3, this out of no distaste for the new product (I have not even seen it) but out of a reliance on some features that will be stripped away from Gallery2 in the new release. Specifically, item-level permissions, a feature which has evidently contributed mightily to the complexity of the underlying database structure but which I find very useful. I also have done pretty extensive hack work and code jujitsu with the Gallery2 templating that I would not care to re-create in a new, presumably more simplified environment. I have other reasons too boring to recount for sticking with G2 for now.

For general CMS (Content Management Systems) stuff on Scriabin.com I stick with an old favorite in Movable Type. I know that some regard Wordpress as superior, and I do not deny WP's advantages for straight-up personal writing sites. But the extended templating options in MT remain useful to me for plugging content into other CMSes and softwares. On Sorabji.com I have a section which updates automatically across 3 sites without crons and plugins, I just have a template which generates a Perl library that plugs into my DICT server, and another template which fills in a .mobi version of things. Some of this can be accomplished in WP with .htaccess and httpd configs -- I am well aware of this because I do these tricks myself in other contexts where I use WP -- but for my sensibilities of site management I prefer static files and MT's templating extensibility, as well as MT's relatively infrequent upgrades. I also like MT because my initials are MT. Hah...

An early challenge with this site, then, was to combine content from MT and Gallery2. There is no specific bridge to connect the two (and without comments and logins on the CMS side it seems unnecessary to inject whatever complexities would arise from combining the two). Specifically, when I make certain content from an issue of The Etude available it seemed to make sense to link to that content from the corresponding cover image of that issue (assuming it's available) and vice-versa. With consistent file-naming and such it was easy enough to tell MT to fill in a txt file with a list of stories from the month, name the file in a format that matches the Gallery2 file-naming system, then tell Gallery2 to look for a file that matches the base filename of the cover image. Maybe that sounds simpler to me than to others but it took just a few minutes of re-purposing an MT monthly archive template, generating a set of txt includes, then telling Gallery2 to look for these files in the individual cover pages. So while this page might look natural enough in substance I had some fun making it possible by juggling the templating languages with which I am so familiar to form a pretty stable link between Gallery2 and Movable Type:

January, 1905 Edition of The Etude (Chopin Number)

Going forward my intent is to make the site look less like a turn-key Movable Type design and more like something I would do. I am not a graphic designer by any estimate nor do I have the funds to hire one, but I think I can craft a look that expresses the character of these old magazines and their content. At present the site looks brittle, and while others are prone to complain about the relative dearth of freely available Movable Type templates compared to other free CMS platforms I find that the starter templates are perfectly adequate for letting me focus on content first, and style later.

Spring must be on its way, for I am listening to the Chopin/Godowsky Study #45 when I find that at about 3:30 into the piece the sounds of the piano music become inextricably intertwined with the sounds of a Mr. Softee ice cream truck sprinkling its summertime noise along the street. Having not heard Mr. Softee's noise for some months it takes me several seconds to realize that I am not hearing some new and confusing counterpoint in this piece of music (which is busy with counterpoint and what Arrau called "ants"). It takes me some time to distinguish the two, to separate the music from the noise pollution, and to conclude that nothing about this recording (to which I have listened countless times) has changed nor am I hearing some new layer heretofore obscure. All I can do is turn off my music and wait for the Mr. Softee truck to pass into the silent distance so I can resume listening to music.

When I started the Etude Music Magazine section of this web site I dove in to my collection expecting to have little interest in the magazine covers. I thought they would be hackneyed or maudlin, and while some of them approach kitsch I nevertheless have come to feel that the quality of the artwork is consistent and genuine.

These oversized and impressive covers remind me of the influence magazine covers used to hold over me. As a child the Time Magazine "Man of the Year" (later re-named "Person of the Year") was an annual declaration of influence that I looked forward to with interest and speculation. Who would it be? Whose face would join the party filled by luminaries and bad guys? It was not just the "Person of the Year" issue, it could be any edition of Time that influenced my perception of how history moved in my life.

In a similar spirit I find that these old Etude covers command some authority. A retrospective look at a few hundred of them shows the influence of Liszt, Paderewski, and Beethoven over the minds of musical culture from the early 20th century. The large format of these covers was common enough in their day but I find that in modern contexts the generosity of the printing and sheer size of these magazines provokes some nostalgia for a journal and a publishing industry that commanded influence over its audience. Among pianists Liszt was (and still should be) revered as a god, as the single most influential force in modern pianistic technique, and it should be no surprise to see the old Abbe grace so many covers of the magazine. Beethoven needs no introduction or explanation for appearing so often on The Etude's cover, while posterity seems to have treated Paderewski with less kindness as his reputation has shifted from being among the great pianists to something more of a charismatic personality.

A more general but often-recurring subject for the covers is music in the home, in the back yard, or at soireés and social gatherings. The Etude branded itself as a magazine for the musical home, a home in which "music study exalts life!" Those many images of Americans young and old sitting at the piano or playing another musical instrument seem crafted to the belief that music is an essential component of a healthy and happy home, with the piano itself depicted as the center of domestic life -- a role that would later be filled by television.

I have more covers to add, and I will do so as my scanning time permits. I need to clear my desk to make way for the oversize scanner, an investment without which this project would be impossible.

Etude Magazine Cover Images Gallery