A few months ago, I received a query from someone researching a composer I mentioned 14 years ago on the Collaborative Piano Blog. They were trying to track down the recording of a work I had written about, including a video taken down years ago and a now-defunct classical music site. Fortunately I was able to find the site owner’s email, who tracked down the recording in their own archives to provide it to the researcher to listen to and reference for their upcoming book.
So much online stuff has disappeared in only 14 years. The firehose of information that we take for granted on the internet, including websites and YouTube videos, can be but ephemeral, and in just over a decade, much of our musical heritage can be lost, especially with performances of new works.
Fortunately, all my Collaborative Piano Blog archives are still live, and that was the only surviving piece of documentary evidence that proved a recording of the work in question had once existed publicly. If it had been a Facebook or Twitter post, all would be lost; searching for archival information is not the strong suit of social media.
That’s the power of blog writing. It might not have the immediate impact of social media, but with the passage of time, those blog posts and the places they link to might be the only remaining evidence of your work and the ideas, people, places, and things that you wrote about at a specific point in time. The burn rate might be much slower, but the upside of a blog remains and can compound over time.
Although I lament that my blogs might not get the same attention as, say, a picture of avocado toast I posted on Facebook a few days ago that received 80+ likes, it’s the blog posts that will be more easily searchable decades down the road, while ephemeral social media posts will be buried and largely inaccessible.
One of the bloggers whose immediacy and honesty inspired me in the first place was an anonymous writer who posted under the name of Canadienne, and talked about her life auditioning, traveling, and performing. Through my online connections, I found out that Canadienne was none other than Canadian soprano Erin Wall, who sadly passed away in October 2020. Although Erin was forced by gatekeepers to delete her entire blog at a certain point because of her unrelenting honesty, Canadienne still lives on at the Internet Archive. Here’s a snapshot of October 2005.
Most of all I miss the action and vitality of the 2005-2010 blogosphere. Years later, you can still get a sense of that vitality on the blogs from that time which are still online.
(Image courtesy of Vika Strawberrika on Unsplash)