Monday, July 04, 2005

What tangled webs we weave...

I didn't mean to take so long between posts, but between the start of a search for a new church music position and some substantial work on my website, my creative energy was tied up in knots. It's been fun to work on the website--certainly more fun than working on my job search! I started off with some pages I had put together on a short early April vacation with a combination of hand coding and Netscape Composer. As I came back to the project last week, I used Arachnophilia for a bit. It supports handcoding, but is a bit cryptic to figure out. I decided to load a copy of Dreamweaver I've not been using lately, and I'm in love.


I set things up so that the website mirrors my web directory on my computer. The uploading is automatic, which I find to be quite slick. As long as I don't goof and save over something I didn't intend to lose, it'll be great. (The answer, of course, is to back everything up.) Dreamweaver gives me a combination of "what you see" and handcoding that I find quite helpful. It's actually akin to my notation software (I use Finale, but Sibelius and others work much the same way). In the case of the notation software, I can look at the notes, or listen to MIDI playback, jsut as with DW I can look at the file, or see the behind-the-scenes code.


I'm intending to use my website as an every-growing catalog. While it's relatively static, I'm hoping to apply the sort of approach I took with my earlier post here about Ellacombe, where I provide program notes and a little background info along with excerpts from the music. I hope I haven't set me too much of a task. To see what I'm trying, check out my pages on a variation set for flute and piano (see discussion and excerpts). Since I'm hoping to provide enough information so that some performers might decide my stuff is worth working on, I'm trying to give them enough information to make an informed decision.

I attended a very nice organ recital at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco on Sunday (July 3, 2005). Ansgar Wallenhorst, a German organist, held forth at the might Ruffatti. I'll have a couple of comments on this delightful event soon.

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