Twitter is remarkable for many things, and one of the funniest—for me—is the plethora of fake personae. Here’s a list of them:
Dr. Tobias Funke from Arrested Development: @drtobiasfunke
Bad Peggy Olson from Mad Men: @BadPeggyOlson
Sponge Bob from Sponge Bob Squarepants: @SpongeBobThinks
etc.
Of course, I’m very interested in fake composers, and my #1 fake composer profile is a fake Beethoven: @DroppinTheBeet
I love the (fake) broken English (or is it broken German?), the inebriated tweets, and a constant reference to John Philip Sousa’s supposedly small genitalia. Others worth mentioning include: @FakeArvoPart
and the very recent @FakePhilipGlass (created 22 hours ago as I write)
Shostakovich tweets from Japan, Prokofiev from Edinburgh
While this is all very funny, I started to be annoyed by some other profiles that are just “parked”, or people who secured famous composers’ names for their personal tweets. I would love to hear about recordings, new editions, and interesting articles on Ravel, Debussy, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Lully, Fauré, Brahms, etc. but the profiles are just owned by people who don’t seem to use them.
Really?! Really?! That’s all you have to say @MauriceRavel?
Is it some Twitter form of Cybersquatting? I’m not really sure but I would love to see musical societies around the world claim these profiles and start using them for the sake of spreading the great music these composers wrote.
In a ridiculous attempt to counteract this phenomenon, I have “rescued” @SainteColombe, @Boismortier, and @CharlesKoechlin from a potential lame future on Twitter. I will be glad to transfer the ownership of these profiles to people that really love their music and will use Twitter to spread news about them. Who would you save if you could? And why not do it now?
Feel free to post your reactions in the comment section or find me on Twitter: @tonalfreak.