January 2, 2001

Dear Friends,

I am extremely pleased to report that The Classical Free-Reed, Inc. had 21,943 hits to our homepage last year. * At this rate, our 50,000th visitor should arrive sometime in early February.

Considering that we had only 25,716 visitors during our first 2½ years of operation (we went online in August 1997), this represents a large increase in traffic to our site, which is reflected in the 100+ letters we printed on our "Readers' Letters" page last year.

(Not bad for a site with rudimentary HTML code and no java scripts! Certainly our emphasis is on content, not form.)

I am also pleased to report that the Free-Reed Journal published 29 essays, including two interviews with classical accordionists and 15 historic articles from Accordion World magazine from the 1930s and 40s. This represents an increase of almost 50% from last year. In addition, the Free-Reed Review published 54 compact discs reviews, 2 concert reviews, two video reviews, one book review and one music score review; an increase of 20% from last year.

This is due to the dedication and selfless efforts of our staff -- 9 unpaid volunteers (including myself) who generously donated their time and service in the interest of free-reed culture and the musical arts: Christopher Adler, Bob Berta, Dr. Paul Magistretti, Steve Mobia, Mike O'Regan, Dr. James O'Brien, and Gregory Vozar. Our editor, Thomas Fabinski, particularly deserves commendation for performing the demanding and thankless task of proofreading everything for content, style and grammar. I must also mention our two volunteers (students of mine) Patrick Kiley and Brian O'Boyle, who typed out the Accordion World articles.

On behalf of The Classical Free-Reed, Inc. I wish all of our visitors a very happy New Year.

Sincerely,

Henry Doktorski
founder and webmaster of The Classical Free-Reed, Inc.

* This figure does not include uncounted visits to our other 416 pages which may have bypassed our homepage counter through direct connection via a search engine index.