Category Archives: Resources

by | January 4, 2012 · 1:00 am

A guqin resource

The open-access online resource John Thompson on the guqin silk string zither presents extensive materials on the guqin (古琴, “goo-chin”) including classic handbooks and commentaries; organological details; depictions of the guqin in art, poetry, and song; notation and sound files; playing instructions; analyses of performance practice; history and ideology; and links to other resources. Detailed information on the author is also included.

Below, Tao Zhusheng performs Guan shan yue (Moon over the mountain pass) in a 1977 film by Robert Garfias. The work is an evocation of the Tang-dynasty poem of the same title by Li Bai.

Related article: Robert Garfias: Ethnomusicology

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by | December 20, 2011 · 1:00 am

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections is a multiformat ethnographic field collection documenting traditional cultures throughout Florida in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This free online resource is part of the Library of Congress American Memory series.

Undertaken in conjunction with the Florida Federal Writers’ Project, the Florida Music Project, and the Joint Committee on Folk Arts of the Work Projects Administration, the collection features folk songs and folktales in many languages, including blues and work songs from fishing boats, railroad gangs, and turpentine camps; children’s songs, dance music, and religious music of many cultures; and oral histories.

The website provides access to 376 sound recordings and 106 accompanying materials, including recording logs, transcriptions, correspondence between Florida WPA workers and Library of Congress personnel, and an essay on Florida folklife by Zora Neale Hurston (inset). A new essay by Stetson Kennedy reflects on the labor and the legacy of the WPA in Florida, and an extensive bibliography, a list of related Web sites, and a guide to the ethnic and language groups of Florida add further context to the New Deal era and to Florida culture.

Above, construction workers gathered around the stove in the craftsmen’s barracks at Camp Blanding, Florida, in 1940.

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by | December 18, 2011 · 1:00 am

Biblioteca Digitale

The Biblioteca Digitale of the Conservatorio di Milano was founded in 2007 through the efforts of then-President Francesco Saverio Borrelli, who envisioned the creation of a digital repository of images of the conservatory’s historical documents, searchable and viewable via the online catalog of Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale, Lombardy.

As of 10 November 2011 the Biblioteca Digitale occupies an area of ​​about 5.1 terabytes for a total of 832 papers and 110,419 images

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by | December 13, 2011 · 1:00 am

Sorabji resource site

Devoted to the English composer, pianist, writer, and critic Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892–1988), Sorabji resource site is a complementary resource for the forthcoming critical biography by Marc-André Roberge.

The menu bar offers broad categories (Biography, People, Writings, Sources, Works, Performances, and Miscellaneous) that lead to some 85 pages, each with a search box,  presenting resources including lists, compilations, tables, and analytical charts related to various aspects of Sorabji’s life and works. A printed version of the entire site would produce a 350-page book.

Below, John Carey performs Sorabji’s Fantaisie espagnole.

Related article: Sorabji’s marathon premiere

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by | December 4, 2011 · 1:00 am

Clamor: Colección Digital de Música Española

Launched by the Fundación Juan March in 2011, Clamor: Colección Digital de Música Española presents open-access documentation of performances of over 800 Spanish works—mostly from the 20th or 21st century—at over 130 concerts presented by the Foundation since its inception in 1975.

In addition to the concert recordings, this resource presents pre-concert talks given by composers or specialists, program notes, scores, photographs, and over 230 composer biographies and works lists.

Below, Suzana Stefanović performs Jesús Rueda’s Love song nº 3 at the Foundation in October 2011.

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by | November 29, 2011 · 1:00 am

Bach Cantatas Website

Bach Cantatas Website is a comprehensive open-access resource covering all aspects of  Bach’s cantatas and his other vocal works, including discussions and detailed discographies of each cantata and other vocal works, performers, and general topics.

The website also provides texts and translations, scores, musical examples, articles and interviews, and over 8,000 short biographies of performers of Bach’s vocal works and players of his keyboard and lute works, as well as of poets and composers associated with Bach.

Also included are relevant resources such as the Lutheran church year, a  database of chorale texts and melodies and their authors, detailed discographies and discussions of many Bach’s instrumental works—including solo keyboard and lute works as well as Die Kunst der Fuge and Musikalisches Opfer—and their performers, reviews, and transcriptions.

Further resources include lists of books and films on Bach, terms and abbreviations, concerts of Bach’s vocal works, Bach festivals, and cantata series; as well as a guide to Bach, a discussion of Bach in arts and memorabilia, and thousands of links to other relevant resources.

More posts about J.S. Bach are here.

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by | October 8, 2011 · 1:00 am

Early music online

Early music online is the result of a project aimed at digitizing 300 volumes of the world’s earliest printed music from holdings at the British Library and making them freely available online. The project has focused on the British Library’s holdings of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, as listed in RISM B/I (Recueils imprimés XVI-XVII siècles).

These collections printed in Italy, Germany, France, England, and Belgium contain approximately 10,000 works, which have been individually indexed. The volumes mainly comprise vocal polyphony partbooks, but they also include early printed tablatures for keyboard or plucked string instruments.

The digitized books can be browsed via Royal Holloway’s digital repository. Full details of each volume, searchable by composer and by title, with links to the digitized content, can also be found in the British Library Catalogue, UK RISM database, and COPAC.

Above, an excerpt from a work by  Jacob Clément (Clemens non Papa) in Le huitiesme livre des chansons a quatre parties, an anthology published in Antwerp by Tylman Susato in 1545 (click to enlarge). Below, Stile Antico sings Clemens’s Ego flos campi.

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by | September 16, 2011 · 1:00 am

Porträtsammlung Friedrich Nicolas Manskopf

Porträtsammlung Friedrich Nicolas Manskopf  is a free online resource that presents portraits drawn from the collection of the Frankfurt wine dealer Friedrich Nicolas Manskopf (1869–1928) of composers, instrumentalists, singers, actors, directors, playwrights, and dancers, along with stage scene stills, views of buildings, and allegorical pictures of music and stage situations.

Comprising about 12,500 photographs from 1860 to 1944 and 4900 printed graphics from about 1550 to 1920, the collection is indexed by person, ensemble, or building; by persons involved as photographers, engravers, or lithographers; and by the publishing years of photos and prints.

A general search field enables the search of professions, roles, playwrights, titles, years, and technique of the portraits; a combined search is possible using the Bibliotheksportal at the hosting institution, the Universität Frankfurt am Main. Higher-resolution copies of the images may be ordered for a fee.

Above, a publicity photograph from the collection of the the legendary trio of Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud, and Pablo Casals; below, the trio plays the first movement of Schubert’s piano trio in B flat, op. 99, D.898, in 1926.

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by | September 11, 2011 · 1:00 am

A rediscovered Scottish folk manuscript

Renovations of Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2000 involved dismantling a “robust but not particularly beautiful cupboard” and storing its contents—mostly old sheet music—for later inspection.

Entirely by chance, the librarian and scholar Karen McAulay discovered therein three manuscript collections of traditional Scottish flute tunes notated by one James Simpson. Her subsequent research enabled her to establish some details of Simpson’s identity, including his residences, occupation, and birth and death dates (1806–73).

This according to McAulay’s “From Dalfield Walk, Dundee, to Renfrew Street, Glasgow: The James Simpson manuscripts” (Brio XL/1 [spring-summer 2003] pp. 27–37). Above, Simpson’s notation of the Strathspey Maggie Lauder with variations.

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by | July 30, 2011 · 1:00 am

An early Gaelic manuscript

The manuscript Original Highland airs collected at Raasay in 1812 by Elizabeth Jane Ross, which is preserved in the archives of the School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, is now available for downloading at no cost, both in facsimile and in an extensively annotated typeset edition prepared by Peter Cooke, Morag MacLeod, and Colm Ó Baoill.

The earliest known staff-notated manuscript collection of Scottish Gaelic music, it contains  92 songs,  51 dance tunes, and 6 pibrochs; it probably represents well the musical repertory of Raasay, one of the islands of the Inner Hebrides. A major task for the editors involved locating, documenting, translating, and underlaying song texts which might have been known to Ross; she provided titles or first lines of verses or refrains for her airs, but not the texts themselves.

The Raasay residents James Macleod and his wife Flora were excellent musicians, and their niece Elizabeth Ross, who lived with them, was clearly a competent transcriber. Raasay was also the home of the great piper John MacKay, from whom Ross learned to play several pibrochs.

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