The Strings Society Manifesto

This began as a fan page. We’re not embarrassed about that — it’s where our standards came from. Nobody cares more about getting a photograph credited properly than the people who waited three years to take one.

Passion got us started. On its own it wasn’t enough. So we read. We checked dates instead of repeating them. We prepared before interviews instead of arriving as admirers. We found out how long a luthier spends on a single instrument, and why a piece written in 1723 still holds a room.

Then people with no reason to flatter us began saying the same thing. Think bigger. Open up. You can do more — you should do more. They were right.

We cover string music for the people in the hall, not the people in the business.

What we publish. Concert notes written while it’s still fresh, when the hands are unsteady and the ears haven’t settled. Albums from ten and fifteen years ago, revisited to find out whether they hold up. Conversations with the people who make this music: soloists, orchestra players, the luthiers whose names almost nobody prints. The history behind pieces that outlived everyone who knew them. And photographs kept properly — with a credit, a place, a date, and a caption that remembers who was there.

We are slow on purpose. The news cycle has forgotten by Monday morning; we would rather publish one thing still worth reading in two years than ten that are gone by the weekend.

We are not the only ones writing here. Some of the best things on this site came from someone who was simply in the hall, in a town nobody covers, and wrote three lines about it. Send us yours. We read everything, and we always reply.

We are independent. No artist, label or management decides what appears here. No gossip, no private lives, nothing written to chase attention. The music is enough, and it always was.

A society is not an audience. It’s a group of people who decided to stay. We are still the ones who couldn’t let a recording disappear — we only got better at keeping it.