You know there’s an article on 10,000 in Wikipedia? That’s right, 10,000. The number. I didn’t know you could have an article on a number. They say it’s between 9,999 and 10,001. They really say that.

Didn’t check all the other numbers.

I remember hearing long ago that in China, there’s a symbol for 10,000, but what it really means is a huge, indefinitely large number. And look at that, it says so right there in Wikipedia. I’m sure the banks in China have a very definite meaning for 10,000 but maybe that huge, indefinite idea is holding its ground where they don’t have banks. Now the Greeks, they even have a name for 10,000: Myriad. How about that, I did not know you could name a number, other than, you know, its name (George Carlin once invented a number—Bleen he called it—and said it was somewhere between six and seven), but those Greeks, darned if they didn’t go ahead and name a number for real. Myriad, who knew it was an actual number?

This blog went up almost two years ago, and I see that it just broke through 10,000 hits. That is a huge, indefinitely large number to me. It may be on the small side as far as blogs go, or large for the average blog, I don’t know, I don’t keep track of those things, but a myriad of hits (see? use it yourself in a sentence!) seems like a lot to me.

I kept a website for a while mainly as a way for me to track down my own things. Program notes, the instrumentation I can never remember of a five-year-old piece, an updated bio: I was always scrambling to find information, so I began the site to keep everything in one place. But as more people played my music, and more people asked about it, the website evolved into this.

The M 10000

The shift was gradual; at first I simply kept a calendar, and added events ad hoc. Then, as I learned more about what I was doing, I grew it into some established pages (those are listed on the right) and added posts about various activities. I started using the blog, in other words, as a blog.

I’ve never wanted this to become a place where I was just spouting off on anything that occurred to me; there are enough blogs like that already. I have expanded it beyond the “my piece is being played tonight, come on out” to various musings, but I’ve restricted them, I trust, to my immediate musical activities: compositions and performances, the radio shows, CD reviews and such. If I talk about good barbeque in Nashville, it’s a by-the-way involving my participation at a music conference there. If I mention Levi Stubbs, it’s only because I wanted to make a point about the ophicleide. No, wait, reverse that. Anyway, you get the idea.

It remains a fairly simple blog. There are bits about my music, audio samples, links to places of interest and those YouTube clips, and some thoughts on various things musical. A myriad of you (as of this writing, 49 over a myriad) have dropped in, and for that I’m very grateful. Thank you.