The idea of an online music encyclopaedia initially emerged in 2011. Legend has it that the project was first conceived when one of our members was strolling down the corridors of his faculty of musicology. Picture his thoughts: “I’m too old to be a musician. Jethro Tull was right. Too old to rock ’n’ roll, too young to die. But what if I write about music? The Encyclopaedia Metallum–Metal Archives has been quite a success and perhaps something similar could be done with classical music or rock. No, think again. I don’t have the resources, sometime in the future, perhaps.”
The question was left hanging there until early 2015, when the fable “Good Luck” (La buena suerte by Álex Rovira and Fernando Trías de Bes) inspired our member of the illuminati to return to his forgotten dream.
No sooner said than done. MusiChess, still with its provisional name of MusiCheck, started to take shape. A second illuminati, a classical musician and a former chess player came on board. Shortly afterwards, the name MusiCheck had to be changed for legal reasons. The new name chosen was MusiChess, introducing chess as a further sign of identity.
At that time, our main classical music influences came from webpages like Naxos (http://www.naxos.com/), Musicalics-Classical Composers (http://musicalics.com/), Classical Archives (http://www.classicalarchives.com/), IMSLP (http://imslp.org/), Music Sales (http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/), Mutopia Project (http://www.mutopiaproject.org/), Classical Music (http://www.classical-music.com/), Classical.net (http://www.classical.net/), Classical Music DB (http://www.classicalmusicdb.com/levels), Hal Leonard (http://www.halleonard.com/index.jsp?subsiteid=63). Moving away from classical music, a great influence has been the previously mentioned Encyclopaedia Metallum-Metal Archives (http://www.metal-archives.com/), as well as MusicMight (http://www.musicmight.com/), Progressive Archives (http://www.progarchives.com/), Heavy Harmonies (http://www.heavyharmonies.com/), Rolldabeats (http://rolldabeats.com/), Polski Rock (http://www.polskirock.art.pl/), among others.
Our main points of reference for chess are: FIDE (https://www.fide.com/), Chessgames (http://www.chessgames.com/), Chess.com (www.chess.com), Chessbase (http://en.chessbase.com/), Chess24 (https://chess24.com/es), Chessmetrics (http://www.chessmetrics.com/cm/), EDO (http://www.edochess.ca/), ICC (https://www.chessclub.com/), etc.
New illuminati, eager to shine their light, have joined in the adventure. Then, out of the darkness emerged MusiChess 1.0 (www.musichess.es), 99% inspired by the format of Metallum-Metal Archives.
Happy ending? Not exactly. Although we’re really pleased with the web programming (by Jorge Abrines), we haven’t been able to find a web designer whose ideas are in line with our expectations for the website. So, we had to change course again.
After all this turmoil, we launched our current website (www.musichess.com), designed by our saviours, Karboncillo.
Recently, the Spanish composer Luis Ivars (known for writing the OST of El Capitán Trueno and Descubriendo India) recommended us two musical projects: Composers Directory (http://www.composersdirectory.eu/) and Mundo BSO (http://www.mundobso.com/), which are our latest points of reference.
So here we are now in the era of MusiChess 2.0. Although due to IT limitations, we have deviated a little from our initial approach, as soon as we can we’ll return to our original idea.
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