Our First Birthday, or, Back to School 2014–15

This blog reckons its formal beginning (after some alpha- and beta-testing) as the start of the academic year, 2013–14. Right now you’re within a couple of clicks of everything we’ve published: expand “Blog Archive” on the right or browse the “Tags” further down.

Here, then, a brief report:

Posts

51 in 2013
75 in 2014

Our goal was to publish about three times a week; the real-life achievement was more like nine a month.

Readership

Musicology Now is visited by between 150 and 200 readers each day, as many as 10,000 in some months, and a grand total today in excess of 250,000 hits.

Our readers are, predictably, from the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany, but also China, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and on and on.

Top 10-ish

These measures are slippery at best, affected in this case by reposting via Facebook, inclusion in established websites and large-lecture classes (and at least one MOOC), etc. Recent flurries of readership (linked below) centered on contributions by Kristi Brown-Montesano and Jeremy Denk on The Classical Style (opera) and Mark Brill on World Cup soccer; earlier, Robert Fink’s “How I Got Over” and John Halle’s response earned a large following. 

Anyway, the list:

Let’s Make a Deal: The Beatles, Ed Sullivan, and the British Invasion, by John Covach, 3 February 2014 (11,000 hits)

How I Got Over, by Robert Fink, 4 January 2014 (2,800); see also Pop Triumphalism Redux, Neoliberal Aesthetics, and the Austerity Agenda: A Response to Robert Fink, by John Halle, 4 March 2014, and Pop Triumphalism, concl., by Robert Fink, 12 March 2014

The Classical Style, of sorts, by Kristi Brown-Montesano, 20 June 2014 (1350); see also Jeremy Denk responds, 24 June 2014, and Snibblesworth-ed, 6 July 2014

Big (Bad) Data, by Robert Fink, 25 August 2013 (1300)

The Composers’ Forum: Favorite Moments, by Melissa J. de Graaf, 15 January 2014 (1300)

To Be or Not: Is “The Star-Spangled Banner” Really Based on an Old English Drinking Song? by Mark Clague, 30 January 2014 (800)

The Magical Power of  “Let It Go,” by W. Anthony Sheppard, 6 April 2014 (750)

Seeing a 17th-Century Motet, by Robert Kendrick, 14 June 2014 (600)

Music for Soccer, by Mark Brill, 22 August 2014 (300)

Meanwhile we did anniversary retrospectives on C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, Verdi, Debussy, and Britten; memorial essays on Howard Mayer Brown, Charles Rosen, Kenneth Levy, Joseph Kerman, Pete Seeger, Lorin Maazel, and James Pruett; and eight installments of our popular advice column, Dear Abbé.

Next Steps

Send us your best work, as the Society’s mantra goes. Publication is usually within 48 hours: it’s painless and brings nice rewards quickly.

Read and re-post. Visit us often: for one thing, the most recent blog postings elsewhere in classical music are linked to our main page (“The Blogosphere,” on the right).

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