Yesterday, I blogged about the Scottish International Piano Competition for our library blog, Whittaker Live. I found myself reflecting that the blog posts which attract most attention tend to be the ones that share tips or insights about how to do something or how something was done. If a blog post is about an event, then it really needs to share something new or extra, that the reader won’t readily find elsewhere.

Clearly, blogging about an event that runs for a week, in the context of a competition that has only just started, can be problematical, especially if there’s already a good competition website sharing plenty of information. Readers won’t want to read a re-hash of what’s already out there. And you can’t write about semi-finals or finals, or even say much about repertoire.

I did what I could! What could I share that’s new? Well, I linked to websites about the soloist opening the competition. I highlighted a useful piano anthology in our own library collection, which might appeal to anyone who was at the opening recital. I invited readers to check our catalogue for music and recordings of pieces that they might encounter during the competition. And I noted that, working in the library, we couldn’t even hear the recital!

Still, I felt something was missing. I went for my tea-break just as the audience was coming out of the recital. I got talking to someone at the cafe-bar. Had they enjoyed it?, I asked.

And it turned out that they had. It was all I needed. An anonymous reaction just perfect for inclusion in quotations marks in my blog post. The three words were just a standard response to an enjoyable event, certainly neither insightful nor attributable, but they gave my posting the human touch.

Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay