Oh, no! Not another classical music blog!

I know just enough about classical music to be dangerous.

So instead of keeping it all bottled up inside, risking a potentially devastating explosion, I’ve decided to start this blog and let my musings on the subject wander freely through the electronic universe.

Not that I’m especially qualified to criticize or comment on classical music. Other than a couple of music history courses in college, I have no formal music education or training beyond high school, when my orchestra and band careers ended and my sporadic private lessons in piano, violin and oboe came to a halt. But I listen to the music, and I listen and read and absorb what others say about it. So rattling around in my brain are all sorts of mostly useless trivia, fragments of themes and leitmotifs, and long-ago snippets from program notes, liner notes and Opera Quiz answers. And now – a decade after blogs were the next best thing – I get to let it all out.

My taste in “classical” music runs toward orchestral works mostly from the Romantic period (Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius) and opera mostly in the last half of the 19th century (Verdi, Bizet, Puccini and, of course, my man Wagner). Lots of mainstream stuff. Actually, this is a gross generalization, as those dates are quite fuzzy and there’s lots of chamber and choral music that I like. Move either way in time, earlier or into 20th century music, some of it I like and more of it I can do without.

And that’s just to let you know very generally where I’m coming from. I get the feeling from reading other blogs on this and other subjects that some of the authors are not so much providing commentary on their chosen topic as they are bashing you over the head with their supreme knowledge, and you or anyone else who might disagree with them is obviously a moron. I hope I don’t fall into that trap, and I promise to do my best not to.

I live in Dallas, so I suspect a lot of what I write here will focus on music in North Texas, a scene that is struggling (as elsewhere) but whose undercurrents are vibrant and exciting. But don’t be surprised by observations that stray to other places (or maybe even off-topic). Hopefully we’ll have some fun along the way!

Now that we’ve taken care of all that, let’s see what happens. That’s the “exposition,” now for the “development” …