Contents: INTRO • WHY BLOG • BLOGROLL

Social Killed the RSS Star

Blogging has not really been “a thing” since Facebook ate it on the low end and traditional media bought up and absorbed most of the high end. Since then, Facebook has decided to eat them too, but not before Generative AI came in to gobble up the written word itself and spew out its now well-known word-salads. On first glance, things feel bleak.

That said, it seems like culture is poised to see more places where quality writing on interesting-to-some topics can make a comeback and gain a cultural toe-hold. With the rise of places like Medium and Substack, and with premium website platforms like Squarespace and Wix, more and more people are finding it easy, enjoyable, and beautiful to write about topics with care, and give them the space they deserve.

Many years ago, when I rebooted my website, I decided at long last that I would begin to centralize my previous blogging, blog-like Facebook posts, magazine articles, scraps, some academic writing all under one roof. For several years, my main purpose was to collect and share out important Florence Price information, as her music has continued to experience a renaissance. This remains important to me! More recently, I have been focused on exploring the miraculous Art of Rehearsal. Meanwhile, many musicians never even vacated the space in the first place.

So today, I’d like to convince you, dear reader, if you’re not already, to consider joining me in a tiny, hand-knit community of musicians, music educators, music scholars, composers, and writers (most of us wearing multiple of those hats).

First, I’ll try to answer why someone would want to write a blog in 2024. Second, I’ll describe my ideas about the music community and list some of the sites, blogs, newsletters, and other music writing that I follow and read.

For one thing, let’s give it up for uniquely beautiful content, with great fonts, beautiful colors, and attractive menu controls and content surfacing. This is where a publishing platform thrives, offering variety of content presentation styles and methods that no Twitter thread or Facebook post can hope to match. Besides making beautiful visual storytelling possible, there is no substitute for, as just one example, linked hypertext, a tool that Facebook inexplicably still does not allow, except in keeping you internal to Facebook’s own platforms.

Second, I believe that there is every reason to worry about freely giving Facebook and Twitter all of our intellectual property for free. We should own our content—or at least share it freely with smaller companies (like Medium and Substack). And we certainly should be able to control our content without the risk that the bots might delete our work without recourse.

Third, at the heart of the matter, is that there is something intellectually healthy that happens when you add personal and professional context, both by committing to a long-form presentation of an idea, and by doing it in a space in which your other professional work is only a menu click away. On Twitter, we are flattened out into tiny disc-like avatars, a funny or bland handle, and a funny or bland username. Facebook adds more context but it’s decreasingly obvious how to get to it on mobile.

The fourth, and perhaps most FUN reason, is that blogging is extremely cool and at this point (face it) retro. I was about the right age (maybe a year or two young but basically the right age) for the first wave of great music blogs in the early like Soho the Dog, Nico Muhly, etc… and it was a strange but wonderful time.

As Twitter has imploded and as Facebook has steadily declined, this a moment to stop and consider. Should we hop to yet additional new platforms, fragmenting our fragmentation into an undifferentiated slurry of stimulating but almost meaningless virally mind-jello which has the effect of turning our minds into jello? Maybe.

An alternative would be to take the very best of what was already working well, and bring it into register with the 20’s and beyond. I think blogging is the best way to try to do that. As I get older, I am finding that music, relationships, and craftsmanship are the things that really make my heart sing.

A music blog dedicated to the craft of musicianship is the kind of place I want to read,

Finally, a place where you own your own writing is somewhat like your home. When you come into my home, you are my guest. l’m glad to have you and I’m eager to form a relationship with you through the written word, enhanced with other media elements. The “digital commons” has its advantages, but the more intimate setting of a one-on-one conversation between writer and reader, spun out over minutes instead of seconds, seems like a pro-social place to be.

I am a musician - a conductor who occasionally likes to write about what I’ve learned. If that appeals to you, this is the place for you. If you are also a musician and/or writer (occasional or otherwise) , it stands to reason that if this appeals to you, I’d like to read and discuss your thoughts as well. If that means we’ll have a small house party instead of a convention floor, that’s ok by me! I love going to music festivals, music education conventions, and conducting conferences. But by the end, I’m also very tired and ready to go home.

Digitally, this is my home. Welcome!

For the youngsters, “BlogRoll” was the name given to the list of other blogs or website you thought might be relevant to your audience when they visit your site. In Facebook parlance, you’d imagine your Friends list, but on a blog, these are going to be more tailored to the specific topics your space tends to cover. In my case, I situate my writing somewhere between the personal and professional, the conversational and the scholarly, and music-making from professional orchestras to 7th grade music education, and everything in between.

This post advertised as a list of news sites, but it is at risk of turning into something of a recipe on epicurious… Two quick notes and then the embedded document. If you would like to bookmark just the list, you can use this link:

jordanrsmith.com/blog/2024/8/22/blogroll-2024#blogroll

Where to Start

This is a long list. If you’re just looking for a very general place to get more music news into your diet without sorting through dozens of sites, I’d wager you could do no better than ArtsJournal. Its feed includes its own roster of great bloggers, as well as great sources like NYT, The Guardian, The American Scholar (from this week: an Ives retrospective), and English versions of non-Anglophone international sources like El Pais. If you’d like to stay narrowly focused on just rehearsal ideas, I’m not sure that there’s any one good clearinghouse for the topic other than (shameless self-promotion) my website at artofrehearsal.com, which includes a way to sign-up for my rehearsal newsletter.

What year is This?

You will again and again see links for RSS feeds below. This technology has come to be seen as extremely old fashioned, but if you are like me and would like to spend a bit less time in “the commons,” RSS remains the best way to stay updated away from the noise. To use them, simply copy and paste them into the RSS reader of your choice. Examples include Feedly, Newsify, and my personal very dorky favorite, Zotero. (NOTE: PODCASTS are ALL built on RSS!! It’s the exact same technology.) To use one, just copy/paste the RSS link into the RSS reader of your choice, and presto! All of the articles go right there. For instance, if you’d like to add this blog, simply copy and then paste the following link:

jordanrsmith.com/blog?format=rss

That said, it will probably never be a universal option for everyone (unless someone like Apple decided to make an RSS reader…). In that case, you can always simply visit these sites, or create a tab group or bookmark folder for the regular “Web” links, so you can quickly cycle through.

That’s it! These are the places I go to find interesting music writing. If there’s a great rehearsal-related or otherwise music-oriented blog, journal, or site you like to read, please let me know about it. If it’s a good fit, I’d love to add it to the list! And if you end up visiting a site that you find useful, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Rehearsal Updates (JUST THE LIST)

I have begun news-lettering as well. It is a spinoff of the blog, focused exclusively on rehearsal technique. You can subscribe below.