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User:Utis~enwiki

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My real name is "Oliver Scholz". If you want contact me via email: alkibiades at gmx dot de

Please put the tag "[wikipedia]" into the subject line, or else I might miss your email, because without it, mails sent to this address go into the "spam" folder.

I live in Frankfurt am Main near Darmstadt and study philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Right now I am trying to overcome my discontent with academic philosophy in order to find the strength to finish my studies and obtain my M.A.. At the same time I am preparing for a career as a writer, since I discovered that both my strengths and weaknesses as well as my inclinations and interests seem to fit better to this calling. My minor subjects in university are sociology and classical Greek, both of which I have a bit neglected lately, the former because my discontent here is even greater, the latter because I chose it rather as an object of love than of scientific study. Love and scientific study go well together, of course. It is just that I am a bad philologist.

(My apologies if I used the English word "science" incorrectly above. The German word "wissenschaft" applies to both the study of nature and to what is in English called "humanities". "Wissenschaft" emphasises accuracy and strictness of methodology.)

I am deeply impressed by the quality of quite a lot of the articles on the "classical music" tradition in the wikipedia, whatever some of the regular editors may say. Even some of those articles that I find intuitively incorrect, incoherent, imprecise or simply displeasing, exhibit in some parts a spirit of commitment, competence and search for precision that's more worth to me than either accurate dullness or blind enthousiasm alone. I'd very much like to contribute. For that I have to learn much, maybe too much. I am still a dilettant and amateur listener whose understanding of music is entirely implicit. But since music is of utmost importance to me in several respects, the process of gaining knowledge ("wissenschaft") in this domain will be one of personal development for me. Until now I have only dabbled a bit in musical aesthetics (Adorno, mostly). For what it's worth: still being an amateur I dare to have favourite composers: W. A. Mozart, Luigi Dallapiccola and Luigi Nono.

Introducing Frankfurt as a city near Darmstadt is actually a (weak) joke. Frankfurt is the larger and better known city of the two. But with its "Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik" Darmstadt is much more important in the domain of 20th and 21st century music. Still, we have the Ensemble Modern Orchestra here in Frankfurt, an orchestra entirely dedicated to contemporary music; this is one of several reasons why Frankfurt is a good place to live for me. I was born in Koblenz in the Rhineland; I moved to Frankfurt, when I started university, because of the Frankfurt School.

One of my hobbies is Lisp programming, particulary in the context of the Emacs text editor. This is what I do for recreation.