It’s been over five years since first working on this project and three years since it was available online, albeit hidden from search engines. I had fervently hoped to launch miserere.org on Ash Wednesday 2022, and then on again on Ash Wednesday in 2023 and 2024. Despite all my good intentions, a few things got in the way!
Work. Work. Work. I was blessed with a challenging and enjoyable role, but it didn’t leave a lot of time for other pursuits. As lockdown lifted, commuting time I’d saved was taken up with travel again.
There was always next year! Well, enough is enough! Time to get focussed!
Worrying over what was the site really for, and whether it would be useful. As more and more amazing resources have been created in the last few years, I was unsure how to position the project alongside the great works of so many prestigious scholars and professional musicians. I needed to refocus on some core goals:
- Enable study of contemporary performance practices and how the Miserere has evolved in modern times.
- Make it easy to find the best information online rather than the repeated stories about excommunication and Mozart.
- Learn from the experience of putting something like this together in the first place, and just see what happens!
So, as it is Ash Wednesday 2025, I am letting search engines discover miserere.org, and committing to spend just a little time across each of the next 40 days to make some progress. There are over 250 more discography entries to populate, and numerous pages of core information to compile. I have reduced the site down to its most basic form, and put in placeholders for now. I just can’t bring myself to place an “under construction” banner on the homepage.
With luck and a fair wind, I hope to have the some more of the core pages and more of the discography entries ready by Holy Week.
Curator, miserere.org