Sunday, September 16, 2012

In which Mixed Meters survives seven years

On September 16, 2005 I posted to Mixed Meters for the first time - 69 words including the title.  I said I would be keeping my posts short.  That worked for about a year.  It wasn't long before I started sharing my short music pieces.  I called those Thirty Second Spots.

My written posts got longer and longer over the years and so did my music.  The name Thirty Second Spots seemed fine up to around 2 minutes.  Then I invented the name Three Minute Climaxes (pieces from 2 up to 8 minutes) and finally Ten Minute Breaks (so far the longest one is 12 minutes.)

These categories are fluid and largely pointless so of course I still adhere to them only when I feel like it.

Online storage space was a problem at first.  Most early pieces disappeared.  Eventually I found more room.  I started uploading historical live performances which document my pre-blog activities (roughly 1975 through 1995).  Within the last year or so I've started posting my recordings with the Peter Schmid Quartet and my very long day-to-day calendar pieces, The Seasons.  (Expect a new one next week.)

AND NOW ... there's a new feature to make finding and playing all those recordings much easier.

Near the top of the right hand column of Mixed Meters you'll see a box marked Listen To Music.  There are six options, each of which will open a page of links.  Each link has a [listen] button (a new window will open and the piece will play automatically) and a [read] button (a new window with the relevant MM post will open).  The Video option takes you directly to a YouTube playlist.

I'm hoping that you, my three dear readers, will find this addition helpful for exploring my music.  I'll be posting more music in the future and will update the links pages as I do.


About Timings

At first, all the Thirty Second Spots were less than a minute long.  I would list the length in seconds along with the copyright notice.  When a piece broke the 1-minute barrier I thought it would be cute to list the total number of seconds rather than use minutes and seconds.  After all, "64 seconds" is no more confusing than "1 minute, 4 seconds".

But I didn't know when to quit.  I've listed the lengths of nearly all pieces as a total number of seconds - no minutes, no hours.  For example I recently uploaded the recording of Vexations. You might think that it's over 6 hours long - but I say it is really 23,085 seconds!

Here is a breakdown as of today of all my musical categories with total timings.

Category Number of Pieces Total Time in seconds
30 Second Spots 34 1,887
3 Minute Climaxes 15 3,900
10 Minute Breaks 4 2,537
Videos 21 3,576
The Seasons etc. 9 11,307
Peter Schmid 5 1,973
Historical Performances 14 8,175
Vexations 1 23,085

That's a grand total of 55,393 seconds.  (Because there are a few pieces listed in two categories, the total is not an exact sum of column three.)

Do you wonder how long 55,393 seconds is in hours and minutes?  Well, go ahead, do the math.


Another post from the first day: In Which David Rewrites The Pledge of Allegiance.  (114 words)

30 Second Tags: . . . . . .

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