A Voyage Around My Ears
I'm Howard Rogers and I'd like to welcome you to my website!
I'm retired now, but used to work as a database administrator and programmer, so 'IT things' amuse, inspire and intrigue me. Unaccountably, too, despite growing up in a house with a sister idolising Cliff Richard, another in love with Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music and a father who once told me that he couldn't understand why I wanted to “sing that crap” because you couldn't even whistle it (he was referring to Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb!), I nevertheless somehow turned into a total classical music 'nut', listening to almost nothing else and seldom enjoying anything but.
This website therefore tends to blend these two passions, trying to document my interaction with all things musical with a hefty dose of the computer-technical (and any other!) means by which I achieve that. So, there are assorted bits of software available for Linux and Windows users, and some 'how-to' type articles too. The data organiser in me has also tried to catalogue the composers whose music I own and the recordings I've listened to. For a couple of composers, such as Antonio Vivaldi and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, I've either re-catalogued their work in a way that makes more sense to me; or, in the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, gone to the trouble of re-translating their major choral works. Much of this sort of work remains incomplete, so I crave your indulgence if various pages hereabouts seem to be lacking significant content.
Meanwhile, other pages are dedicated to analysing what music I am currently listening to and what my past listening experience has been.
This site has just recently replaced absolutelybaching.com. The key articles have now all been transferred from the old site to the new (with a little bit of updating and polishing applied in the process). The big remaining task is to transfer across the user manuals for Giocoso and Semplice: I'm working as speedily as I can to achieve that. It may take a month or more, however. All the software can, however, be downloaded and installed from the new site and the instructions for doing so have been re-written accordingly.
The user manual for Niente has, I think, now been ported across from the old site in its entirety. There are, perhaps, some cross-links and some HTML syntax bits of tidying up still to do, but the substantive content should be there in its entirety.