Mark Gresham | 15 AUG 2022
When children are toddlers, we tend not just to celebrate annual birthdays but also half birthdays, and in the case of infants, we measure age by months. Such short yardsticks of time have significant meaning in the context of such a short time on earth. For our elders, we think of decades (e.g., octagenarian). Even Facebook’s advertising demographics classify everyone 65+ into one group.
Today EarRelevant turned 3-1/2 years old. It’s still a toddler, but we did get past the “terrible twos.” We learned how to walk, made it through the pandemic in a healthy state, and are growing and developing toward the future despite all the social and economic challenges the entire journalistic world is facing today.
Although I had posted articles before that date, February 15, 2019, was the official beginning of EarRelevant.net as a full-time publication. We marked that decisive turning point with this review: Atlanta Symphony thrills with music of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff. After that, there was no turning back to writing primarily for another publication.
Let’s call the period EarRelevnt existed in some form before that a “gestation period.” But it was born out of the critical need for an Atlanta-based publication devoted primarily to classical music and opera, and their cultural environment.
Birthing a publication is one thing. Raising it, growing, and maturing it is another.
We are in what will appear to the average reader to be a prolonged period of slow publication rate, which is a valid observation about the number of visible articles published in recent weeks. Atlanta typically finds August in the doldrums as far as local classical music is concerned. But where the development with EarRelevant is happening in the background, behind the scenes. Like any fallow time, it’s what you don’t immediately see that lays the groundwork for the fruitful seasons.
That’s what we’re doing. It’s keeping us very busy! Especially me as the website’s publisher and programmer. This underground work is happening now because when the new season kicks in, it will be a 24/7 endeavor to keep up with the writing and editing. I do look forward to it.
In the meantime, you will see the emerging results of more automated, database-driven regular features such as the 2.0 version of THIS WEEK ATLANTA that we implemented earlier this year. Because there are few concerts taking place locally at this time, you won’t see many of those yet in the concert calendar for the upcoming week. Still, you will see copious listings of local radio broadcasts and streamed audio programming. Generous listings of concerts will show up automatically once the new season kicks in.
You can also check in on our automated national news feed, listing article links from selected North American sources in our NEWSFEED. Will we add news from Europe as well? Possibly. Readers will simply have to watch to see what we do and when. It’s all step-by-step.
We’re working on developing other regular features as well.
You can follow these developments by subscribing to the EarRelevant Reader, which has been a very occasional e-mail piece but will become more regular this fall. There is a bright future for this growing child. Hang with us, be part of our story, and be of good cheer: You will like what’s forthcoming as we move toward our fourth anniversary in February 2023. ■
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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