Monday, August 23, 2010

of mild side project interest

Pete's in Berlin and Jack's in Costa Rica but I think I can do this without complete dereliction of mild interest duty: I'm going to try to blog about all of Shostakovich's musical works in a row, one at a time.

Or at least all of his commercially recorded works, which after some preliminary searching is most of them. I'm hoping this will harness my most recent upswelling of Shostakovich fanaticism to some productive end and kickstart me into writing about something on a very regular basis. I'm also interested in whether I find anything coherent to say about my response to the composer's body of work. I'll be tilting at a rate of 4 or 5 pieces per week, at least initially; we'll see if I can achieve and sustain that rate. Should be fun!

I'm calling this project The Exhaustive Shostakovich and it's located, at least initially, at ExhaustiveShostakovich.wordpress.com/ . I'm hoping to continue to dress up that site in form and function (how many bachelor's degrees of computer science does it take to adequately customize a Wordpress blog?) but it's up and going now, or should be, with a fresh post about the scherzo in F-sharp minor, opus one. The risk of embarrassment in front of the committed Of Mild Interest readership will, I hope, encourage me to get it fully up and going in the next couple of weeks. I will continue to post non-Shostakovich-related content here.

At any rate, if the concept sounds, well, mildly interesting to you I'd be happy if you read along as I roll it out. At the moment, putting up one post there has failed to accelerate my typically pokey writing pace, so I should pedal on into the office.

3 Comments:

Blogger Pete said...

I don't suppose there's any chance you'll be interspersing your Shostakovich reviews with MMA fan-fiction, is there?

8/23/2010 2:10 PM  
Blogger nate said...

The chances are slim to none there, Pete; sorry. I could conceivably work in the couple paragraphs of Shostakovich-themed, supernatural film-noir detective story I emailed to Jack a few weeks ago when he jokingly mentioned the concept of "the [Shostakovich book] where he solves mysteries and fights bad guys by radiating energy directly out of his soul". Not sure that one's ready for prime time, though.

8/23/2010 8:38 PM  
Blogger Pete said...

Which is to say, I support your writing regularly in a serious, good manner, about one of your passions in life... but, holy crap! absolutely yes! intersperse a serialized crime novel about Shostakovich-as-energy-radiating-supernatural-private-dick!

That's, like, both your wheel-houses rolled into one.

8/24/2010 3:02 PM  

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