Professor Carol is traveling to Budapest today. While she is preoccupied with conducting tours and webinars and writing about Mahler, I thought I might take this opportunity to say a few words about our Friday Performance Picks.

I began this series in October of 2014 and, as you can see, we now have 437 high-quality performances highlighted and archived on this site with some (hopefully) illuminating commentary for each. As the list grew, we decided to add a searchable index in order to make it a bit more user-friendly. In many ways we have only scratched the surface.

In our college years, Carol and I, strangers then, both purchased hundreds of albums. Remember those? I invested much of my disposable income, such as it was, into building my own library of music. It was my most prized asset. When I spent a year between degrees as assistant manager of a record store, I used my employee discount to double my collection. That was how students like us learned much of the repertoire that we needed to know.

Listening to a wide range of music was not only necessary to my studies but also a favorite pastime. Exploring new pieces and revisiting familiar ones remains, I think, one of the best uses of my time—rewarding intellectually and spiritually. Now, searching for interesting works to use as Performance Picks adds a new impetus for doing what I most like to do.

Many of our readers are involved in Classical Education with its emphasis on the great books. Carol and I are committed to heralding music as an essential part of that movement. I could add here many paragraphs about how today’s culture has replaced a meaningful engagement in the substance and beauty of music and literature with passive entertainment, often of dubious quality (or worse), but our readers already know that.

I still hear one of my undergraduate professor’s frequent and emphatic laments: “The problem with you students is that you don’t know any music!” He was right. We were learning about music without a sufficient context of music in our heads. And ultimately it’s the music itself embedded in our hearts and minds that matters. That comes gradually, but it snowballs into something that can be one of your most prized assets.

So I plan to continue writing Friday Performance Picks for the foreseeable future. We hope that the series might serve as your music library and allow you to explore the extraordinary breadth and beauty of music across many eras and genres.