Introduction

Have you ever been listening to some music, and completely fallen in love a shimmering Neapolitan chord arpeggiated by strings, or been haunted as cold clanging percussion drops away to reveal warm intimate guitars, and felt like you could talk about the rhythms and harmonies and textures for hours but you don't know who would listen?

This seems to be a recurring problem for me, which I am attempting to solve by starting up this blog. Honestly, I don't expect to have many/any readers (although clearly I expect at least a few of my friends to make it to the second post, or I wouldn't bother with this introduction). Writing these essays is really an excuse for me to solidify these ideas which swirl around haphazardly in my brain, and also for me to let loose my bombastic and oftentimes sesquipedalian tendencies. However, if people should happen to discover my blog and find themselves interested and enlightened by something I say, I'd be delighted. Nice comments on my posts will bring me an irrational amount of joy.

So what exactly am I going to be writing about? I don't expect to be doing a lot of reviewing here, although I imagine once in a while the urge to tell people how much I love (or hate) a specific work of music will get the better of me. My aim is to write more general articles about commonalities in music from different genres, what makes music interesting and how it works on us. While understanding a piece of music doesn't automatically make you like it, it can definitely open you up to listening to it in new ways — which may (or may not) lead you to appreciate it, which in turn can be a different route to liking it.

Since the primary audience of this blog is myself, I'm occasionally going to want to dive into some technical nitty gritty and carelessly drop musical jargon without trying very hard to make it accessible to a layperson. This shouldn't deter you; if you are interested, regard it as an invitation to do some reading on Wikipedia, or, better yet, to email me and ask me to explain it slowly. Otherwise, you should still be able to enjoy my essays without understanding the harmonic function of that Neapolitan.

My hope is that, in reading my essays here, you may learn to appreciate the music you love in new ways, and also broaden your horizons and discover new music to fall in love with. More than that, I aim to push myself to think about music more deeply by forcing myself to organise my thoughts in coherent written form, and to constantly be exploring new music myself.