Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Scriabin essays

Scriabin essays The history of western music is riddled with the eccentric personalities of composer and performer alike. None, however, are quite so extraordinary as Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915). A composer of massively ambitious works who is nonetheless best regarded for his piano miniatures and sonatas, Scriabin embodied many contradictions. He was at once avant-garde and conservative, worldly and naive. Faubion Bowers, Scriabins principal biographer, asks and answers, "Who was he, this central Scriabin? A composer, pianist, poet, mystic, solipsist, and semi-, theo-philosopher." Scriabin was indeed all of these things, but only two of these hats fit him well. He was a pianist of remarkable ability, and equally adept as a composer, while his mysticism has served only to trivialize his music. In spite of the high quality of his compositions, Scriabin is by no means a household name. Though he has long been a favorite of many pianists, comparatively few people outside of his native countr y of Russia would know much about him or his music. Nevertheless, Scriabin was an innovator of great importance in Russia, even if his influence was more muted in the West. As his compositional idiom developed, during Scriabins final years, "his music pushed further into the realms of atonality than any Russian composer had dared to go." Yet, despite his achievements, Scriabins place in annals of Western music is relatively minor and oft debated, mostly due to the fact that few, if any, composers ever followed in his path. Like many composers, Scriabins works are often problematically separated into different periods; in his case, early, middle and late. The problem arises due to the fact that there are no clear breaks in Scriabins portfolio to make such easy separations. Rather, his creative work was in constant development, maturing from a conservative Chopinesque style into an idiom that was innovative and thorough...

Sunday, March 1, 2020

Ask an Expert How to Boost your Author SEO Reedsy

Ask an Expert How to Boost your Author SEO Reedsy How to Boost your Author SEO: An Interview with Murray Izenwasser As an author in the beginning stages of a marketing strategy, where do you start when it comes to author Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? It can be very daunting having to compete with large publishing houses as well as already successful and well-known authors. To help tackle this really important topic, we had SEO expert Murray Izenwasser give his insights on how exactly author SEO works.Click play below to watch the video chat or read the transcript below! Hi Murray, I really appreciate you talking with me today. Why don’t you start out by giving us a bit of background on yourself and Biztegra?Thank you! I’ve been doing the online stuff since the 90s so a long time, but Biztegra has been around for about 6 or 7 years now. When we started Biztegra we wanted to bring the digital agency and the way we approach it to a smaller organization. We do two things: marketing on one side and technology on the other. With marketing, we do the optimizations for searches on social and mobile applications and for technology we have developers in Argentina who build out the web, social, and mobile applications we need to support those marketing programs.Last year, we launched a product called Publishr, which is a platform where our publishing clients will be able to move their websites over and onto. In the publishing industry, we’ve found that there’s a lot of opportunities for websites to improve. Historically, people in p ublishing were â€Å"bound† to traditional printing and now the people who are left are the onesThat's great and I agree with you that it really just does come down to time and not annoying your audience. This has been very helpful for our authors who are either trying to rank higher on Google or building their author website or trying to gain traffic on their blogs. Thank you so much, Murray!Follow Murray Izenwasser and Reedsy on Twitter: @MurrayIz and @ReedsyHQHave you experimented with SEO and Content Marketing? Do you have a marketing strategy for your next book launch? Let us know your thoughts, or ask Murray any question you want, in the comments below!