Ivan Moravec Web Site
About this site
Disclaimers
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This is a non-commercial site: we do not sell recordings or tickets and have no professional relationship to Ivan Moravec. Consequently, we're not able to arrange correspondence, meetings, or lessons with him. Also we don't have information about master classes with him.
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We do not represent Ivan Moravec's concert or recording agents, nor his personal views. The administrator of this site bears sole responsibility for its content.
Copyright notice
Except as otherwise noted, original content in this Web site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Briefly, the Creative Commons License gives you permission to copy, distribute and display original content from this site, including for commercial purposes, with a few conditions. For example, you must give the site credit for the work. If you alter, transform, or build upon our material, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. Finally, any of license's conditions can be waived if you get permission from us.
This license does not apply to content which is owned by others or to material that we have licensed from someone else. Examples are images scanned from CD covers, reviews from Amazon.com, liner notes, and epigraphs. All such content is copyrighted by its owners. Neither our use of such content nor the Creative Common License should be construed as granting permission to anyone else to use or distribute such copyrighted material. Obtaining such permission is entirely your responsibility.
Content belonging to others is always attributed if we know the owner or author, and is used only when:
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We believe that it is anonymous or in the public domain, or
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We have gotten permission from the owner, or
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Common principles of fair use can be reasonably applied.
If you find copyrighted material on this site that you think should be removed, please let us know.
Accessibility
This site was originally readable only using conventional Web browsers, as most Web sites still are. This meant that people using text-based and assistive technology readers were probably unable to access the Ivan Moravec Web Site easily. I have tried to address this problem by redesigned the pages to meet accessibility guidelines recommended by the W3C and the United States Section 508 statute. This law, requiring “that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities”, promises to motivate many businesses and organizations to improve their Web sites.
As of May 1, 2004, I have validated all pages except the search and mail form for compliance with the most important accessibility goals the Bobby validation program at http://bobby.watchfire.com, a popular benchmark tool. What's next? Probably XHTML output instead of HTML. I welcome suggestions for improvement.
The perpetrators
Webmaster
Denis is the site's chief
cook and bottle-washer, by night, a software technical writer by day. He
was a cabinetmaker in a previous life. Denis heard Ivan Moravec for the
first time in Jordan Hall, Boston, in 1976. Disappointed at missing a
Moravec concert a few years ago, he began looking for a source of timely
information about Moravec's schedule. The search led him to the eminent
record producer and music writer James Goodfriend, whose Connoisseur
Society label had done so much to bring Moravec to the world's
attention.
During correspondence between Denis and Jim and his wife Carol, somebody mused that "Ivan really should have a Web site." Impulsively Denis chimed in, "I can do one of those," or words to that effect. He forgot to mention that he'd never done "one of those" before. No matter. Besides letting him learn on the job, the Goodfriends jumped in and helped. He has also received invaluable help from Ivan and his lovely wife Zuzana and daughter Iva, and from Moravec's business agency. Denis would like to add more features like audio samples, multilingual pages, and CD ordering. But despite the site's low tech limitations, he is happy if it helps a great artist to connect with his audience.
Good friends
Jim is our resident expert on everything about music
and the music business, and has been a close friend for many years of Mr.
and Mrs. Moravec. In the early 1960's, Jim, and his producer-colleague, E.
Alan Silver, founders of Connoisseur Society Records, heard a stunningly
beautiful European tape of Ivan playing a Beethoven Sonata and Debussy's
Feu d'Artifice, along with several other pieces. After much investigating,
they managed to arrange for Ivan to come to the USA to record for their
small company, Connoisseur Society Records. Those early recordings
received high critical acclaim and are still available on CDs.
Jim's professional involvement with Connoisseur Society ended in 1964, when he went to work for Columbia Masterworks as their Literary Editor. Then, in 1965, he became music, editor, writer, and chief critic for Stereo Review, a position he held for 17 years. Upon Jim's leaving the magazine in 1982, the Goodfriends' art dealership (C .& J. Goodfriend, Drawings and Prints) changed from a part time to a full time occupation, and with Jim at the helm, has now been in operation for 33 years.
Also a friend of the Moravec family, Carol Goodfriend has been a classroom music teacher trained in the Kodaly concept of music education. Now she teaches after-school piano lessons combined with sight singing. Semi-professionally, she sings duet lieder repertoire with Beth Samuels and their accompanist Natasha Ulyanovsky. Recently, they released a CD of 19th century duet lieder.
When not teaching, Carol assists as a partner with her husband in the family's art dealership, C&J Goodfriend Drawings and Prints (www.drawingsandprints.com), which focuses on original drawings, prints, and watercolors from the late 1400s to about 1950.
Karl Fogel
Karl Fogel has generously contributed the ivanmoravec.com and ivanmoravec.org domain names. Karl is perhaps best known as the chief architect of Subversion, the premiere open source version control system today. As it happens, we now use Subversion to keep track of every change to this site, and so we are grateful to Karl for that contribution as well.
Robert Snow
Robert Snow has helped immensely with the Ivan Moravec discography project. He tirelessly scours eBay and other Internet sources for rare and out of print issues of Moravec recordings, and ruthlessly ferrets out my mistakes. Without his work and keen eye, the discography would still be a mess.
How this site is built
This site is written entirely in XML, then transformed into the HTML that you are reading. Initially I created the site directly in HTML (using SoftQuad's HotMeTaL Pro), with a lot of JavaScript glue to hold it together. As I maintained the site, I learned how limiting it was to have the site's code rooted in proprietary Netscape and Microsoft technology. Influenced by experience with XML publishing at my "real job", I decided to redesign the site from the ground up. In early 2004 retooled the site with the following standards-based features:
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I author these pages using Norman Walsh's WebSite XML DTD (an extension of the general-purpose DocBook DTD). This robust platform may be overkill for a small site like ours, but it sure makes maintenance easier than working in HTML. Now when I update a page, I seldom have to fiddle with layout or internal functions, but usually only change the text.
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I transform the XML to HTML using my customization of Norm Walsh's website.xsl stylesheets. Builds are done using Michael Kaye's Saxon XSLT processor. The whole tool chain is driven by Ant. Ant detects just the pages that have changed since the last build, and transforms only those pages. I then upload the new HTML output to our Web server.
All production is now done on Linux using open source tools. Except for my nice graphical editor (currently XML Mind), the site costs nothing to produce. The old Windows box remains to debug the pages on Internet Explorer, because that's the browser that the vast majority of our readers use.
