Finding music on the internet

When preparing a piece, or researching performance practice, it can be helpful to listen to several versions of it. There are the usual library resources of the compact discs we have on the shelf, and databases such as Classical Music Library. If you are looking for more, the internet is a logical place to go. I recently ran across a site - Songza.fm - that acts as a music and video harvester, meaning it is searching and pulling content from most music and video sites on the internet - mainly YouTube and iMeem. From there the user can create a playlist, which can be added to or shuffled at any time. Any user can embed a single music file or video using their easy sharing widget (see example below), or can link directly to an account to share an entire playlist. (See the Music Library's Brahms example here. Songza is even enabled with rss, allowing someone to subscribe to your song feed. This takes Songza from being a place to search for and listen to music, to a way to share music with others.



The new Google Discover Music is another option for locating music files on the internet, although it currently has less functionality than Songza.fm. The Google Discover Music partners with iMeem, Pandora, Rhapsody, lala, and MySpace, meaning once you have done a search you are presented with a list of various sites containing that work or song. The song is more likely to be a preview rather than the entire piece, depending on which partner's site you end up on. The benefit of using this over a regular Google search is that it is only looking for music files (.mp3, streaming, etc) and will filter out all the results that would normally be included in a search such as lyrics, CD retailers, and so on. What it doesn't do is allow you a quick way to listen to all of the results in one place.

Both Songza.fm and Google, along with all their partners, provide clear pathways to allow you to purchase the music you are listening to.

Categories: Music Resource

Women in Music

One of my pet projects this summer was to read more about women in classical music, and to do a lot of listening. I thought I'd share the resources I came across in the Maxwell Music Library.

We have sixteen books with the subject heading of women and music, and that is where I would start if you were interested in this subject. My top two included Women Making Music by Bowers and Tick, which talks about women in the western art tradition (1150-1950). This has a great overview of the topic. To delve deeper, I would recommend Women in Music edited by Neuls-Bates, an anthology of source readings from the middle ages through 1995. The most memorable section to me were the letters to Fanny Mendelssohn from her father and brother, telling her why she should not be striving to write music.

The best reference tool we have is Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide, published in 2005. It includes sections on reference works, music histories, feminist theory, sexuality, music education, historical periods, ethnomusicology, and various genres.

An essential resource when considering this topic are the two anthologies of music by women edited by James Briscoe. We have the accompanying CDs.

Many of the audio databases have playlists related to women in music, like the one on Blues Women (Furman users only) in American Song by Alexander Street Press. Dig in and do some listening, and remember that all of our audio databases have unlimited users!

We also have books, scores, and recordings specific to each composer, so once you have learned more about the overall theme of women in music, you should be able to go deeper in the collections of our library.

Kindle Music Experiments

This summer I had the opportunity to try the sheet music newly available for the Kindle, the wireless reading device made by Amazon. I tried both the regular (6") sized Kindle and the KindleDX, which has a 9.7" screen.

From Kindle Experiments

Right now, Kindle treats sheet music as it does any other image. Most images you might come across on a Kindle would be book illustrations or images accompanying a news story, which can be zoomed to as big as the screen on the Kindle. You can't make the image bigger than the screen, which is prohibitive when viewing a page of music on the Kindle. The image above intentionally captures my thumb for scale purposes. This is as large as the music will go! Obviously it would not be conducive to use as a sheet music replacement for practicing or performing, but there are other uses I can see for it. It could be a way to bring along a score to a performance, or to study your music while on the road even if you aren't able to practice. It should be noted that there is no backlighting on the Kindle, so while it works well in the outdoors with no glare, it could not be used effectively in a dark theater without an additional light source of some kind.

From Kindle Experiments

On the Kindle DX, the screen is larger, but side by side with a page of regular 8 1/2 x 11 music, you can see how it is still considerably smaller, and almost seems squished horizontally.

From Kindle Experiments

One advantage of the Kindle DX is that you can choose portrait or landscape view. I was optimistic that this would enhance the viewing of music, but because it treats the music like an image and not like its own entity, the image is actually smaller in landscape view since it is still trying to fit it all on one page. If you attempt to zoom in from this angle, it will make it larger, but also flip it back to portrait view.

From Kindle Experiments

One feature of the Kindle and Kindle DX that I really like is the ability to select a text size, whether you need a bigger font or prefer to fit more on a page at once. It works so well for reading a book, newspaper, magazine, etc., but this functionality does not carry over into music viewing. I think Amazon will need to develop a file format for music that goes beyond an image file so that users would have as many options with music as they do with text. I was surprised they didn't go in the direction of working with Scorch, for instance, which to me would make much more sense (but also might require more audio functionality as well).

So would I suggest the use of a Kindle for music? Not really, not yet, but I'm excited to see how they improve on it, or perhaps how other similar products develop in the next few years.

Dedicated Listening Carrels '09

Garrison Ries - for years of dedicated service

Tiffany Gibson - for years of dedicated service

Robert Wells - for being the most likely to end up on our shelves in the future

Natalie Wren - for delving deep into the resources of the music library

Heather Jackson - for serving as the music library welcome wagon

Patrick Preacher - for setting a good example

Congratulations everyone! These signs will remain in the listening carrels for all to see from 2009-2010.

Trial of RISM

If you are a Furman faculty member or student, you can access the trial to RISM Series A/ii: Music Manuscripts After 1600. This database is an international, annotated bibliography, which aims to document the world's musical sources of manuscripts or printed music, works on music theory, and libretti. A comprehensive annotated index and guide to music manuscripts produced after 1600 containing 585,559 records by over 20,500 composers from manuscripts found in over 750 libraries and archives in 31 countries.

The trial will go through May 17, 2009. Please tell me what you think!

Categories: Music Resources, Music Trials, New Resource,

Elliott Carter - 100 Years and Still Composing

In December, Elliott Carter celebrated his 100th year with a concert at Carnegie Hall. Carter is still composing now, in fact of his body of work containing just over 130 pieces, 30 were written in the past ten years. 10 were written in 2007 alone, and 6 in 2008.

Other Resources:
Carter Centenary Web site
Contains press release, upcoming concerts, photos (including the one used above), works listings, and more detailed bibliographical information.

Elliott Carter works on DRAM (requires Furman user name and password)
112 pieces you can listen to online, spanning his composing career

Items in the Maxwell Music Library about or featuring Elliott Carter and his works
Highlights include Flawed Words and Sudden Sounds, a book-length interview with Carter about his composing done in the early 1970s, and his Collected Essays and Lectures gathered in 1997.

If you are around Wednesday, January 14, stop by for birthday cake to celebrate!

FU Community United to Save PASCAL

PASCAL is the agreement that allows our university access to myriad databases as well as providing PASCAL Delivers which many of us benefit from every day as a quicker way to request items our library does not own. The money that the State of South Carolina has put into this may soon be pulled, and therefore we may lose many important databases and services. A student created a Facebook group with more information and to show support, so if you are a fan of the resources PASCAL brings us and have a Facebook account, join today!

If you are a fan of the resources brought to us by PASCAL and want your voice to be heard outside of Facebook, you can share your story here. These will be collected and presented in front of the legislature. Act now, and save these important resources!