Category Archives: Resources

by | May 28, 2010 · 7:43 am

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

An initiative of the Department of Special Collections of the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project presents digital remasters of nearly 8000 cylinders that are catalogued according to standard library rules for sound recordings. The collection may be searched by keyword, author, title, subject, year, or call number, or it can be browsed by genre, instrument, topic, or language. The recordings can all be heard and downloaded for free; the project is happy to receive donations of further recordings and financial support.

Among the collection’s rare gems are 225 recordings of pre-1902 popular music, including cylinders of Sousa’s Grand Concert Band.

Related article: John Philip Sousa, violinist

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by | May 15, 2010 · 1:28 pm

The pure drop

Produced under the Australian government’s Broadband Production Initiative, Ether Multimedia’s The pure drop is a free online resource that describes itself as “an exploration and celebration of traditional and world music”.

The site is organized around eleven short videos—all under six minutes—that explore topics such as instruments, lyrics, and transmission; links to further information about the specific topics in the videos are provided, and study guides, maps, a hyperlinked index of persons, and other supporting materials are included.

While this resource is clearly intended for use in secondary schools, and is so used throughout Australia, it is available to anyone interested in video interviews, performances, and mp3 audio by traditional, neotraditional, and popular musicians such as Billy Bragg, Värttinä, and Yothu Yindi.

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by | May 11, 2010 · 11:22 am

Musique contemporaine / Contemporary music

Founded in 2007 by a consortium of French and international institutions and ensembles, Musique contemporaine/Contemporary music is a bilingual search engine for contemporary art music resources held at French institutions. Users can listen to excerpts of unpublished sound archives of conferences and concerts and read the program notes for these events. A glossary (in French) defines the main concepts involved in contemporary music, and an interactive structural map provides links to glossary entries, composers’ biographies, work excerpts, and so on. Also included are an interactive tag cloud of the composers who are most referenced, a composers’ timeline, and an interactive map showing the main French contemporary music organizations and providing their addresses. Simple and advanced searching tools are available.

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by | May 8, 2010 · 9:41 am

Petrucci Music Library


Founded in 2006, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) hosts the Petrucci Music Library, a free wiki-based source for public-domain scores.

The library, which is named for the innovative music printer Ottaviano Petrucci (1466–1539), mainly comprises scans of music editions whose copyright has expired; it also welcomes scores by contemporary composers who are willing to license their works without charge.

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by | May 3, 2010 · 12:54 pm

Omaha Indian music

Part of the online American memory series sponsored by the Library of Congress, Omaha Indian music presents traditional Omaha music recorded in Nebraska in the 1890s and 1980s. This multiformat ethnographic field collection comprises 44 wax cylinder recordings collected between 1895 and 1897 by Francis La Flesche and Alice Cunningham Fletcher, 323 songs and speeches from the 1983 Omaha powwow (above), and 25 songs and speeches from a 1985 concert at the Library of Congress; contextual information is provided by photographs, field notes, and interviews with Omaha tribe members.

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by | May 2, 2010 · 3:34 pm

Follow the drinking gourd

In 2008 the technology and publishing executive Joel Bresler created the multimedia website Follow the drinking gourd to share his research into the origins and history of the U.S. song, which was popularized by The Weavers and has been recorded some 200 times and reprinted in over 75 songbooks.

While providing ample documentation of the song’s reception history, this unusual resource probes persistent questions regarding the song’s provenance—not least, whether there is any basis for the idea that it was sung by African Americans during the Underground Railroad era. The site presents discussions by authoritative folklorists exploring such questions, and concludes with an invitation to collaborate by supplying further documentation.

Above, the first known publication of the song (Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1928).

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by | April 28, 2010 · 3:03 pm

Concertina library

Concertina library: Digital reference collection for concertinas is an online collection of English, Anglo, and duet concertina resources, with entries ranging from research-based articles to instruction manuals, sheet music, and organological studies. Created by the computer scientist and concertina player Robert Gaskins, the library aims to compile and index all of the writings by leading authors on concertina matters, making them available to the public for free.

Above: Marie Lachenal with her concertina, ca. 1885.

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by | April 24, 2010 · 9:21 am

Music theory from Boethius to Zarlino

The winner of the Music Library Association’s 2009 Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music theory from Boethius to Zarlino: A bibliography and guide by David Russell Williams and C. Matthew Balensuela (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2007) is a companion volume to Pendragon’s  Music theory from Zarlino to Schenker: A bibliography and guide by Williams and David Damschroder (1990). Like the earlier volume, the book aims to create a logically organized introduction to major Medieval and Renaissance theorists and a thorough review of scholarly work on them.

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by | April 15, 2010 · 11:15 am

Musipedia

Inspired by (but not affiliated with) Wikipedia, Musipedia is a searchable, editable, and expandable online collection of melodies. Entries can contain notation, a MIDI file, information about the work and the composer, and the Parsons Code for Melodic Contours. The database can be searched by tapping rhythmic information or by entering melodic information on a virtual keyboard, through a microphone, or using the Parsons Code.

Above, a screen capture shows that the first phrase of The star spangled banner has been entered. A search yielded that song (with notation and a midi file), along with melodies by Beethoven, Chopin, and Šostakovič, and several traditional songs and dance tunes.

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by | March 22, 2010 · 3:11 pm

Association for Cultural Equity

 

Founded by Alan Lomax in 1983, The Association for Cultural Equity‘s mission—“to facilitate cultural equity, the right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage”—is realized through several projects that use and expand upon Lomax’s research, including the digitization and dissemination of his field collections.

As a part of this service, ACE supports a free online research center that includes an archive of Lomax’s collections; the sound recordings are indexed by place in ACE’s Lomax Geo-Archive, which provides excerpts from the recordings along with the full details of each recording session. Through cooperation with ACE, the American Folklife Center houses Lomax’s physical collection.

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