Per Nørgårds skrifter online is an archive of nearly 500 writings, arranged alphabetically by article title. Full text is available for nearly 400 items. A chronological work list, 1949–2012, is included, along with a full biography of the composer.
The site is sponsored by Det Kongelige Bibliotek and edited by Ivan Hansen.
Below, the finale of his 8th symphony (2011).
Comments Off on Per Nørgårds skrifter online
Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Resources
American choral music, 1870–1922, a new open-access online resource, is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Choral Directors Association (ACDA).
In 2007 the ACDA and the Library began a collaborative effort to create a website devoted to choral music that would present music in the public domain, available for users to download. The site serves to highlight the collections of sheet music in the Library of Congress and to advance and promote the performance of choral music.
The 76 works presented are limited to a period beginning shortly after the Civil War and ending in 1922. The music selected reflects the diversity of choral music in the collections written during the later 19th- and early 20th centuries and includes accompanied, a cappella, sacred, and secular works for mixed choirs, women’s and men’s ensembles, and children’s choruses.
Below, Amy Beach’s Through the house give glimmering light, one of the works included on the site.
Filed under Resources, Romantic era
Classical guitar music in printed collections is an online, continuously updateable index to classical guitar repertoire in published collections and anthologies.
This open-access resource is intended for use in libraries and by aficionados of the instrument, and takes as its model and inspiration various print indexes of repertoire in collections. Entries are indexed by composer, work, and publication, and each entry includes an incipit and a link to the source collection.
Above, a screenshot showing two listings for guitar transcriptions of John Dowland’s The most sacred Queen Elizabeth, her Galliard; below, a performance of the work.
Comments Off on Classical guitar music in printed collections
Filed under Resources
A catalogue of Mass, Office, and Holy Week music printed in Italy, 1516–1770 focuses on the vast repertoire (comprising approximately 2000 sources) of music for the Office, Holy Week, and the Mass published in Italy from 1516 to the cessation of the printing of such repertoire in the latter part of the 18th century. Even by the end of the first quarter of the Settecento, Italian prints of sacred music were quite rare.
Compiled by Jeffrey G. Kurtzman and Anne Schnoebelen for the JSCM Instrumenta series, this free online resource includes a wide range of indices, from academic references to publishers.
Above, Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Secondo libro, an edition covered in detail in the catalogue (click to enlarge); below, his Ave Maris stella, one of the works preserved in this edition.
Comments Off on A catalogue of Mass, Office, and Holy Week music printed in Italy, 1516–1770
Filed under Baroque era, Renaissance, Resources
Launched by the New World Symphony in 2015, Making the right choices: A John Cage celebration is a free online resource dedicated to Cage’s music.
In celebration of the composer’s 100th birthday, Michael Tilson Thomas and the NWS presented a week-long festival of Cage’s music in February 2013. That festival was the starting point for the videos presented on the site.
Some of the videos primarily capture the live event. Others take the performances much further, adding layers of visual interpretation that provide deeper insight into the spirit of his works.
Below, one of his orchestral works (the NWS videos are not available for embedding).
Comments Off on A John Cage resource
Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Resources
American vernacular music manuscripts, ca. 1730–1910 is a free online resource supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The site presents digitized images of holdings of the American Antiquarian Society and the Center for Popular Music. It is searchable by keyword or title; advanced search options are also available.
Above, Sorrowing hearts at home weeping sad and lonely, or, When this cruel war is over, one of the most popular songs of the U.S. Civil War (click to enlarge). This manuscript, attributed to Charles Stewart of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, contains shape-note music and lyrics on ruled stationary and is inscribed “August 24th 1867, Saturday half past” and “June 9th 1868”.
Below, a concertina rendition of the song by Gary Coover.
Comments Off on American vernacular music manuscripts, ca. 1730–1910
Filed under Popular music, Resources
Bruckner online is a large-scale Anton Bruckner Internet portal that includes complete digital copies of all manuscripts and first editions along with information on relevant persons and places. This new joint venture of the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung and the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften aims to create unique opportunities for research and concert practice.
Currently 730 signatures are available, most with philological commentary. In addition, around 7,000 high-quality color illustrations of sources in Austrian archives are presented.
Comparisons of different versions of the same work are easily facilitated. A compilation of important episodes from the composer’s life and a literature database complete the current phase of the project.
Below, Sergiu Celibidache conducts Bruckner’s seventh symphony.
Comments Off on Bruckner online
Filed under Resources, Romantic era
Edited by Barra Boydell and Harry White, The encyclopaedia of music in Ireland (EMIR; Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2013) is the first comprehensive attempt to chart Irish musical life across recorded history. It also documents Ireland’s musical relations with the world at large, notably in Britain, continental Europe, and North America, and it seeks to identify the agencies through which music has become an enduring expression of Irish political, social, religious, and cultural life.
EMIR is the collective work of 240 contributors whose research has been marshaled by an editorial and advisory board of specialists in the following domains of Irish musical experience: secular and religious music to 1600; art music, 1600–2010; Roman Catholic church music; Protestant church music; popular music; traditional music; organology and iconography; historical musicology; ethnomusicology; the history of recorded sound; music and media; music printing and publishing; and music in Ireland as trade, industry, and profession.
EMIR contains some 2,000 individual entries, which collectively afford an unprecedented survey of the fabric of music in Ireland. It records and evaluates the work of hundreds of individual musicians, performers, composers, teachers, collectors, scholars, ensembles, societies, and institutions throughout Irish musical history, and it comprehends the relationship between music and its political, artistic, religious, educational, and social contexts in Ireland from the early middle ages to the present day.
In its extensive catalogues, discographies, and source materials, EMIR sets in order, often for the first time, the legacy and worklists of performers and composers active in Ireland (or of Irish extraction), notably (but not exclusively) in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It offers to the general reader brief lives of Irish musicians throughout history, and it affords the specialist a detailed retrieval of information on music in Ireland hitherto unavailable or difficult to access.
Below, the nocturne in B flat major by the widely influential John Field, one of the composers covered in the book.
Folkways in Wonderland (FiW) is a cyberworld for musical discovery with social interaction, allowing avatar-represented users to explore selections from the Smithsonian Folkways world music collection while communicating through text and audio channels. FiW is built on Open Wonderland, a framework for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds.
FiW is populated with track samples from Folkways Recordings. Since acquiring the label in 1987, Smithsonian Folkways has expanded and digitized the Folkways collection while enhancing and organizing its metadata, all of which are now available electronically.
FiW is collaborative: multiple avatars can enter the space, audition track samples, contribute their own sounds (speech or other) to the soundscape, and also communicate through text chat. Nearby users can hear music together, as well as hear and see each other. Wonderland also provides in-world collaborative applications, such as a shared web browser or whiteboard. Thus users are provided with a real-time, immersive, audiovisual representation of the virtual sociomusical environment, together with multiple means of communicating within it.
This according to “Folkways in Wonderland” by Rasika Ranaweera, Michael Frishkopf, and Michael Cohen (Sound matters 3 March 2015).
Above, a screenshot of a typical session (click to enlarge); below, a brief demonstration.
Comments Off on Folkways in Wonderland
Filed under Resources, World music
The Fons de Música Tradicional at the Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC-IMF) in Barcelona has more than 20.000 melodies, copied on paper, collected between 1944 and 1960 throughout Spain; most of them were compiled through the 65 folkloric missions and 62 notebooks presented to competitions organized by the Folklore Section of the former Instituto Español de Musicología of the CSIC, in which 47 researchers participated.
Launched in 2015, Una colección de patrimonio musical español/Una col·lecció de patrimoni musical/A Spanish collection of traditional music heritage is an open-access database comprising digitized materials of the music collected in the competitions and missions of Andalusia, Balearic Islands, Castile-La Mancha, the Castile and León region, Catalunya, Galicia, the Murcia region, and the Valencian community; more materials from these and other Spanish regions will be incorporated later.
The site can be navigated in Spanish, Catalan, or English; searches may be organized by source, location, researcher, informant, genre, or title. Audio files of the melodies will eventually be added.
Above, notation for the instrumental tune Paciendo el rebaño; the full record, which includes other visual materials, is here.
featured – Bibliolore