Welcome, welcome, welcome to FermataPhone, a Classical music blog where we explore great music!
You may recognize the phrase "explore great music" as the tagline of online music merchant HBDirect.com. Much more than mere marketing hyperbole, this call to enrich your musical life is vital to sustaining a life-long passion for music. Since you are reading this, I’m confident in assuming that music is special in your life. But despite the fact that our daily lives are so immersed in music, we admittedly tend to sequester ourselves with the familiar while leaving the rest unexplored.
You may recognize the phrase "explore great music" as the tagline of online music merchant HBDirect.com. Much more than mere marketing hyperbole, this call to enrich your musical life is vital to sustaining a life-long passion for music. Since you are reading this, I’m confident in assuming that music is special in your life. But despite the fact that our daily lives are so immersed in music, we admittedly tend to sequester ourselves with the familiar while leaving the rest unexplored.
But what’s the cure? Well, while on exchange in Italy last Fall an important notion of social music exploration was first revealed to me. Before a night out in Milan, we exchange students, from backgrounds that blanketed most of the globe, would convene around a computer or an iPod and play Hot Potato DJ, sharing musical favourites enthusiastically and spontaneously. Each new song brought new recommendations and by the end everyone left with a new set of artists for their own permanent collections to remind themselves of their exchange. Our common identity was indeed music.
Social music exploration can happen through any medium and that’s precisely what this blog is to become: a platform for virtual friends on a common expedition through the vast Classical genre to share, discover, and explore music! Every week I will pick an overarching “theme”, or more appropriately a “leitmotif”. On each Wednesday and Saturday I’ll post a new review of a work plucked from the gargantuan Naxos Music label. These themes (leitmotifs) will be anything and everything, and the works covered will stray from the common in search of something off your radar. Albeit some obscurity, everything will be worthy of reverence.
This is only the half of it! After each post, I want you to tell me what you think. Offer up your feedback, recommendations, anecdotes -- basically anything that furthers the FermataPhone blog community’s quest for new, great music. I’ll join in too! This way everyone will benefit most from our discoveries.
So what are you waiting for? Get your stereos and headphones ready and let’s “explore great music!”
Happy Listening!
_
Phil
