About Bachtrack

There are plenty of wonderful websites within the classical music world, covering all sorts of different aspects: great record stores, great sites about individual composers, orchestra sites, and so on. But we found that no-one seemed to have brought it all together, and when we asked Google the simple question of “what concerts are on”, it was incredibly difficult to find useful answers.

So in December 2007, we started Bachtrack. We intend to be the definitive site that brings together every aspect of classical music into a single place. As well as listings and search facilities for concerts, recordings, radio stations and services of all sorts, we will have news and features on all sorts of subjects, from getting babies interested in music, through sites for young children, ways to involve teenagers, to helping people of all ages find out about classical music without feeling patronised.

As we have been building Bachtrack, we have learned about a vast array of events and programmes that most people we know simply don't ever get to know about. There are wonderful free concerts at music schools like the Royal Academy of Music. There are energetic charities like Cavatina, who bring the top chamber music players into schools. The Government has put in place some fantastic initiatives to encourage youth music, such as “Take It Away”: a scheme where parents can get an interest-free loan of up to £2,000 to pay for an instrument or tuition or both. There are amazing schemes to take professional orchestras and chamber orchestras into schools all over the country. Bachtrack will tell you about all of these.

We would like to work together with all professional music makers, promoters and venues so that you don't have to check what's on with tens of different websites, you can find the concerts or performances on our pages.

We know how difficult it is to search through a mass of unstructured data on dozens of different web sites, and we want you to be able to find information you need as quickly and as easily as possible, as well as learning things that will interest you. We've therefore developed some smart database technology which is specially geared to classical music, to let you specify what you're looking for and get answers with the minimum of fuss. Over the coming months and years, the amount of information on the site and the geographical areas that we cover will grow rapidly – but we are confident that we can keep the basic ease of finding things even as the amount of material grows.

About us

As a very young child, David used to sneak out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs listening to the wonderful Chopin, Mozart and operas his parents would play in the living room below. He also used to read the opera libretti and sing bits of Verdi in the garden, performances which went mercifully unrecorded. David is the technologist on the team, having run a variety of hardware and software businesses, but undoubtedly enjoyed his work most (and had way too much fun) when he had the opportunity to run a pro audio company.

Alison came to classical music in her early twenties through a pianist boyfriend and some dedicated teaching. Her interest was very much revived when we had children. She discovered quite how awful were most of the tapes you could buy for babies and toddlers to listen to, ended up leading a local mother and baby group in singing, and playing “kitchen bands” with our two tiny children.

Music is a huge feature of our family life. The house is littered with David's guitars and other sundry stringed instruments, our teenage daughter composes show tunes and plays guitar and drums, our son plays classical and jazz piano, and there's usually music playing – live, recorded, or occasionally several at the same time. We listen to music of all types, from Béla Bartók to Béla Fleck, Mahler to Marley, and from Die Zauberflöte to Bernstein, Coldplay, Brubeck or Grappelli. We often go to concerts, and as you'd expect our concert going taste is as eclectic as our taste at home.

So we're not classical music purists, and we couldn't possibly advocate that people have to be exclusively classical. But classical music, opera and ballet are part of a glorious, rich musical picture, and we'd like everyone to know enough about it to be able to choose it sometimes.

Site credits

We're proud that the site is built more or less entirely on open source software, most particularly Dries Buytaert's wonderful Drupal content management system.

Graphic design was by James at Mousetank Multimedia.

Thanks to Julian Robichaux for the Javascript date picker.