When my dad wrote all this — correction: over the decade-plus that he wrote all this — I watched as he carefully copied thirty five separate word documents onto a flash drive with hyperlinks to a thousand assiduously sorted “snippets” of audio.” This way (he reasoned), the magic of Mozart can travel around with you in your pocket! Happily blind to the side-eye that confused recipients of this gift bestowed upon him, and deaf to my protestations that he was clumsily trying to reinvent the internet, he continued johnny-appleseeding this project — one thumb drive at a time.
The idea that this project had (as he put it) an “audience of one” began as a joke that nobody would ever read it, but as I read it (filial duty), I began to be more and more impressed by the scope of what he’d done. This year I could bear it no longer, and I acted as his Salieri: I transcribed his entire project exactly as written and the music is interspersed throughout the mass commentaries as hyperlinks. As God intended.
Any errors in the links are my fault, and if you report them, I’ll fix them. Your link will open in and switch to a new tab — and start playing automatically. I couldn’t find a way to demand the links use your media player of choice. I’ll be happy to hear from any wordpress mavens who know how to do that. Finally, if you’re as weird as he is and you want to join the conversation, you’ll notice commenting is enabled on the individual masses. I will individually approve those — dad doesn’t need to sort through endless spam about enlargement and singles in your area. I’m sure dad would love to tune in to your community orchestra’s livestream of the K167 or whatever, so please address all e-correspondence to Steve Holmes (c/o me); be sure to begin the subject with “Mozart.” (I get a lot of spam about enlargement and singles in my area.)
That’s all the fine print. As dad writes, “Shall we get to the music?”
And will the Salzburg Cathedral PLEASE get back to him already?
Lucien Holmes
lucien @ holmes . gmail . com
