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Volume 27, No. 4 - June 2003
Anderson, Michael: Music-Related Web Resources of Interest Jun03/72
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The Internet, with its vast resources, offers an unprecedented volume of information to trumpet players. ITG offers this column as an introduction to this exponentially expanding resource. ITG cannot guarantee that these locations are completely accurate, and that all copyright laws have been observed. For suggestions and/or comments, contact Michael Anderson, website@trumpetguild.org
Music-Related Web Resources of Interest
ITG JOURNAL EDITOR, GARY MORTENSON, AND I decided to dedicate the June Web Site Reviews column to online music resources that are not specifically trumpet related. It is our hope that any musician, student, music educator, or music enthusiast will find these sites useful and entertaining.
Of course, there is an overwhelming number of fine music web sites, so my challenge was deciding where to start and how to approach this kind of column. Ultimately, I decided to simply present a random sampling of excellent web sites that I have stumbled upon over the years.
A site I recommend to my students doing basic research on any musician, composer, musical genre, or recording is www.allmusic.com, the All Music Guide. AMG publishes resource books on most styles of music, but I can’t imagine why anyone would buy them, considering the free web site they make available to the public. Go to this site, put in any name, and an incredible set of pag es comes up. They make available all sorts of basic information on the artist including a short biography and photo. The biography can be expanded into a lengthy and more complete entry. Throughout the entire page there are hotlinks to related artists, style periods, and recordings. Following the biography is a long list of related artists, all with hotlinks to their pages, and then a complete discography with links to pages on each recording with detailed information. Be sure to drop some breadcrumbs as you explore this site because you can go and go until you don’t remember where you started. For classical music, hit the "classical" button or go directly to www.allclassical.com. Here you will be able to search and explore, in a similar manner, the realm of classical music. If you are a movie buff, explore the world of film in the same way at www.allmovie.com.
I am continually amazed by the information amassed by AMG and made available on their web site. For instance, they have "Music Maps" that show complex connections between different styles and sub styles of music. Each entry on the Music Map has a hotlink to more specific information on that style. You can move right, left, up, or down from that style to one that is related. You can trace the evolution of a type of music and see what other styles influenced it and where it went next. It is truly amazing and, at times, frustrating to experience due to the overwhelming amount of information in front of you. You owe it to yourself to spend a minimum of 30 minutes just randomly clicking around on this site. It’s fun to experience this way, but it can also be a serious, well-organized tool that you can tame when you need to get to the information.
The United States Government’s Library of Congress is another astounding web site resource. They have been gradually archiving, in digital formats, American historical and cultural media of all types. Of particular interest to the musician will be stunning scans of American sheet music from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and sound files of music from the same era. If you are a Civil War era buff, this is the place for you. To find the musical goodies, go to the site entitled, "American Memory – Historical Collections for the National Digital Library" at http://memory.loc.gov/. On the right side of the page is a link entitled, "Collection Finder."  Here you can browse through the collections catalogued in a variety of categories, but if you want to browse through only collections with sheet music or sound files, click on the appropriate links in the right column. You can also browse by time period by clicking on the timeline at the bottom of the page, but these indexes are not limited to music alone. From the prioritized indexes, you can navigate to specific collections. Each collection is different, but its main page is organized like the others and is self-explanatory. If sheet music or sound files are available, you will see links to them. Each piece of sheet music usually comes in three forms; a low-resolution JPEG for screen viewing that loads quickly, a higher resolution JPEG that will print fairly well, but loads more slowly, and a high-resolution TIFF file that will print beautifully, but takes awhile to download. Sound files come in "Real Audio" format, which requires that you download a little application that will interface with your web browser to play the files. They usually come in MP3 format as well, which can be played by most browsers with no special configuring or separate application.
You may prefer to search the American Memory site by keyword as well. If you know exactly what you are looking for, this is the way to go. For instance, if you are looking for old cornet solos, just go to the "Collections Finder" page, click on the sheet music link in the column on the right, and type in "cornet piano" in the search window. When I did this, the site returned about 500 hits and at least half of them were specifically cornet and piano pieces of sheet music. That’s a lot of free music! Like the All Music Guide website, the American Memory site is enormous and will keep you busy and entertained for a long, long time. Both sites are excellent resources for music educators and their students.
Finally I point you to the companion website to "Jazz – a film by Ken Burns" published by PBS at: http://www.pbs.org/jazz/. Although this website promotes the ten-part series broadcast by PBS, it also contains a wealth of information about jazz history and how it relates to American culture. This site is beautifully designed and features excellent navigational tools. There are many audio samples, numerous photographs, extensive biographies excerpted from the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, discographies, and excerpts from the companion text, Jazz, A History of America’s Music. The site also features basic information about music, a "virtual piano" page where you can play along with music on a piano on the screen and a virtual jam session where  you can mix and match elements of jazz and hear how they sound.
Click on Jazz Kids and you are taken to a site dedicated to introducing children to jazz. The design of this site is just as attractive as the parent site, but it is clearly geared toward younger visitors. Elementary and middle school music educators could make great use of this site. Many of its elements are easily incorporated into the general music curriculum, and the site authors provide extensive lesson plans and assessment documents that can be followed for classroom use. All of the pages have a "kids" style of design and the text is simplified for younger viewers. In the "Now and Then" section, there are many "Musical Kids" stories written by youngsters involved in music programs. This gives kids visiting the site a chance to read about the musical experiences written by enthusiasts their own age. There are interactive sections on this site such as the "Improvisation Station" and "Repeat the Beat." These require plug-ins to be installed with the browser, but they enable kids and parents to listen to, and interact with, jazz instruments and other musical elements on screen.
I was so impressed with the PBS web site dedicated to jazz that I went to see what other music-related sites they have published online. I was thrilled to find a long list of sites, all rich with content on many different topics. All can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/neighborhoods/arts/#music.
In the next column I will return to reviewing sites with trumpet content. Check www.trumpetguild.org/top25.html for my list of leading online trumpet resources. You may submit any web site for review by emailing me at: website@trumpetguild.org.
| About the author: Michael Anderson is Assistant Professor of Music at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska. He is the Executive Director of the ITG Web Site, a member of the ITG Board of Directors, the ITG Journal Editorial Committee and Chair of the Technology Committee. Anderson was also the project manager of the ITG Journal CD-ROM that was distributed to each member three years ago. |
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