i blew $100 on music books today. yah, books. there is one type of printed matter which free internet downloads are yet to kill off, and that is the printed volume of piano music. i have tried on a few occasions to print out freely downloaded public domain scores, hole punch them and stuff them into 3-ring binders, but the best efforts i could summon produced shitty collections of pages that came flying all over the place. at first this seemed like an advantage to me, for it would be handy to be able to replace pages at will, or re-order pages in favor of better page turns. but the reality is that this is all a lot of bother, and the perceived shortcomings of printed volumes are, in the end, just fine with me. some editions exhibit specifically irritating editorial decision-making processes, but by and large i will take what the printed matter ends up being.
some types of musical printed matter are threatened by technology, but i don’t know if free internet downloads are the culprits. orchestral parts, parts for school bands, these incredibly annoying scraps of paper which must be distributed and retrieved before and after any rehearsal, that sort of crap can and should disappear in favor of touch screens on which players can edit and annotate their parts as needed, without the waste of paper endemic to traditional systems.
but somehow, in music publishing, the printed and bound volume is still king, at least to me. free downloads of obscure and long out-of-print scores are useful for research and even playthroughs, but somehow the self-publishing tic does not extend to musicians essentially re-publishing scores.
i also blew $100 on a single score, a Messiaen bird suite which will reach my 181 next week. today i blew $100 at Dowling Music on 57th Street, picking up the complete Schumann piano music in 3 Dover editions. i never got around to getting those scores, the complete (more or less) Schumann piano works, until today. in fact, Schumann is one composer whose scores i attempted to download and hole punch and load up into binders. it just never made sense. i also grabbed Bach’s Art of Fugue in another Dover edition, and a bunch of Stravinsky stuff in what I think was a Boosey & Hawkes volume. one of the folks behind the counter remembered me, or else my name popped up on his computer screen as a repeat customer. probably the latter. another woman working there remarked on the Dover eiditons i had purchased, and we got into a quick survey of all the fly-by-night editions Dover tried to get away with at various times. she mentioned a berlioz vocal piece (i don’t remember the name) which Dover published in a unique format, with the full orchestra version on one side and the piano reduction on the other. i rued the time i missed out on Dover’s short-lived edition of the Shostakovich Preludes & Fugues. i didn’t even know about that edition until it was already long gone, and years later i managed to get a decent deal on the Peters Edition of those pieces at a Juilliard Bookstore closeout sale. and then there was the ridiculous “reprint first, ask questions later” incident involving Dover’s arrogant reprint of some Paderewski editions of Chopin’s piano music. that debacle is legend in the music publishing biz, as we discussed in passing at Dowland’s today.
i walked to midtown, noting the confusing new pathways carved out for to make it easier for bicyclists to ignore the law about dismounting their bike and walking it down the ramp of the Queensboro Bridge. signs for that law seem to be cynically placed, for no fucking reason.
i am going to order a RAID tomorrow. this will be my first primary capital expense for 2011. it should arrive Monday, if i order it in time. the November 14, 2010, server blowout still echoes in my experience, reminding me (not that i needed the reminder) that digital content and all the legacies contained therein is laughably precarious. a RAID is basically a hard drive on steroids, but it is only a fatter band-aid, and it too will fail eventually. a RAID presumes failure. the fortunes of the hard drive industry presume failure, presume the manufacture of an item known to be significantly inferior to comparable products in other realms.
i can not believe i am purchasing a RAID. that used to be the bailiwick of ISPs and data centers, now it is the realm of everyday digital flunkies like me. of course it does nothing to compensate for fire and terrorist attacks and physical destruction, but it does come with a suitably worthless parts guarantee should such calamities swallow all my data.
i am not getting this RAID in any specific response to the November 14, 2010, blowout. that day of infamy vaporized another level of resource which this RAID may or may not have been able to back up or be of any practical value.
God alive i am overextended.
