I really forgot just how good this was. As a confirmed ficcer of Haendel and other composers, I unashamedly love the fact that the fanfiction/mashup mentality has taken over just about everything once again. It’s probably no accident that I love Baroque so much. The pasticcio is as old as time.
It may also explain why I love arranging and variations so much; I developed a lot of my creative muscle in fandom, up to and including fanfiction. I sometimes find myself wondering whether my instinct toward arrangement and variation isn’t some sort of failure to take my own creative output seriously or some other negative take, but I think a good part of it is just that I came of age in a community that just expected one to reach out and grab the things one likes and play with them like clay. And perhaps the fact that I feel alone doing this is just because there doesn’t seem to be an amateur community of people who do this to classical music like they do with popular music. If I did pop song mashups, I’d be fine. If I were a professional composer or performer who did this, I could write stuff like “The Enchanted Island.”
But it is not an accepted amateur fandom.
Maybe though, there are ways to do this. There certainly are people on YouTube and whatnot who play tons of classical music on nonstandard instruments and who even do covers of it, like funtwo’s cover of the Canon in D. There is a distinct possibility that, as crappy a pianist as I am, I will just have to bite the bullet and do it myself to become a part of that community. I may need to find a classical piano teacher who is willing to help me work on my technique to the point where I can play my own damned stuff well enough that I won’t cringe too bad at uploading videos of it.
Fire and Air 