Electric Monkey Pants

A belated “Happy Thanksgiving” to you all. Sorry if I’ve been, I dunno… – distant, lately. I had a great time with family and friends and I hope the same is true with you. As for my whereabouts, let me assure you they were… where I was… about.

We (meaning “the band”) have starting recording a new (okay, the) album. We worked on it every spare moment during Thanksgiving vacation, and we got a few songs pretty much in the can. But there are many that need a lot of work yet. A few of the songs are perhaps more… fluid than I would like. We hope to nail them down soon.

As for the band name, I’m open to suggestions. We’ve been trying to think of one for months to no avail. Help us, or we’re stuck with Geeech!

Hey, where’s our fucking wiki, man? I just searched for “classical music wiki” and I got precisely 8 results.

Doesn’t classical music seem like an ideal basis for a wiki? Don’t know what the hell a wiki is? Well, here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] ^[1]) is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

We’ve got a wiki for quotes and for animal species and for Macintosh computers. Why don’t we have a wiki for classical music, encompassing a detailed history of composers, conductors, pieces, players and classical music through the years, while also being a repository for the songs themselves, both in audio and musical notation form?

Most of the relevant songs are in the public domain, although many recordings of the music might not be (consider the copyright of the recording versus publishing/performing rights). Still, such a resource could be an incredible compendium of knowledge concerning something that is woefully misunderstood by the general public…. or just not understood at all.

I can’t believe that here we are in late 2006 and I just used Google, our most comprehensive search engine, and wasn’t able to find a single wiki project for classical music. Am I just retarded? Can somebody fill me in? Is there some amazing classical music resource on the web that could help me learn more about music theory, composers, notation, the instruments themselves and even the players in both modern and ancient times? Classical.net is good, but not exactly jizz-worthy.

You might say “well, why don’t you start one” — and that’s a good idea. However, I have limited time as the emptiness of this blog lately demonstrates amply. Also, I am currently pursuing a challenging musical enterprise — starting a rock band! We’re getting really close. We hope to have a CD recorded soon, which will shortly be followed by some club dates around town. (However, we’ve been having trouble in the name department. Our first choice, Geech, is already pretty much taken. Suggestions welcome.) I would much rather, in this case, be the guy who comes up with the idea and then goads someone else to do all the heavy lifting. [evil grin]

But somebody else must’ve had this idea already. Where’s the fuckin’ wiki, man?

This is kind of weird… Am I just not finding it? WTF?