Sunday, June 29th, 2008
Grove Music Online has recently been incorporated into a new electronic reference produce, Oxford Music Online. Oxford Music Online is a portal that provides access to three music reference sources: Grove Music Online, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Oxford Companion to Music. All three resources can be searched at the same time, or you may choose to search only one at a time.
Grove Music Online still contains The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd Edition (2001) and regular updates to those publications. It includes over 50,000 articles from over 6000 contributors from all parts of the world and is the largest English-language music reference source. The migration to Oxford Music Online also includes a few changes to Grove:
- Links to… Database of Recorded American Music
- Links to the RILM database of Music Bibliography
- Improved Works List display
- Learning Tools and Resources provide study tools for teachers and studen
The Oxford Dictionary of Music has “content geared toward undergraduates and general users,” while The Oxford Companion to Music “offers more than 8,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres.”
On Oxford’s What’s New page, the authors outline several other current and forthcoming changes. Let us know if you have any difficulties accessing this new source.
Friday, June 13th, 2008
A recent Miami Herald article reports on the renewed interest in vinyl by consumers.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers’ shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.
The article provides details on the increased emphasis on sales of vinyl records by online and brick-and-mortar retailers in response to consumer demands. We never stopped believing at the ML/SRA!
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Naxos has announced another new addition to the content in Naxos Music Library.
col legno
The Naxos Music Library is pleased to welcome the highly respected col legno label to its collection. col legno began in 1982 and has been devoted to new classical music, providing top-class recordings of music by today’s composers. It is now encompassing revolutionary music of past centuries and music which, in various ways, defies categorization. Thus, its scope is broad and fascinating: from Schubert Lieder recorded by the East Tyrolean band Franui to interpretations of classical music by outstanding jazz performers to plans for awarding new commissions. This is a fresh and feisty label!
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
Check out The Hype Machine for feeds about bands that people are blogging about. You can browse by the most blogged bands, the most recent posts, or search for your favorite band and see what the blogosphere has to say about them. You can also listen to a snippet (or in some cases, all) of the tracks mentioned in blog posts and find links to purchase them online.
Friday, May 30th, 2008
La Scala has announced that composer Giorgio Battistelli will be setting Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as an opera. Read more in The Guardian.
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
DRAM has announced the addition of yet more content, including:
Mode Records: An American new music label with an extensive catalogue of works by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis, and Morton Subotnick. 18 new albums with 53 in production.
Lovely Music: Robert Ashley, Roger Reynolds, Lois Svard, Christian Wolff and many more. 39 new albums with 71 more in production.
Open Space: A recording label and publisher of experimental composers including Elaine Barkin, Benjamin Boretz, J. K. Randall, Mary Lee Roberts and others. 12 New Albums with 18 more in production.
BGSU user’s may hear these and other recordings on the DRAM website.
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
If you’ve been having technical difficulties accessing DRAM recently, it could be because of a bug in v.7.4.1 of QuickTime. DRAM advises the following update:
A new QuickTime update was released last week (v.7.4.5) which fixes this issue. It can be downloaded here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads
/quicktime745forwindows.html .
As always, let us know if you encounter difficulties not addressed by this fix.
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Naxos Music Library just announced the addition of the following three labels to its online content:
Launched in 2002 by music industry veterans Simon Foster and Melanne Mueller, Avie Records has always operated with the interests of artists first. An eclectic label, Avie Records artists include the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Trevor Pinnock and the European Brandenburg Ensemble, Douglas Boyd and the Manchester Camerata, and Christopher Hogwood.
Based in Switzerland, Divox AG/Ltd was founded in 1984 and began with a focus on the promotion of emerging chamber music artists. It now has four sub-labels, covering music from ancient to modern by mainstream and less familiar composers, as well as world music. Divox has always taken pride in its commitment to individual musicians and their own interpretations, as well as the quality of the recordings themselves.
Located in the Netherlands, Challenge Classics is run by a group of jazz and classical music enthusiasts. Leading national and international artists are represented, performing a wide variety of music. The Brodsky Quartet performs Britten, Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra perform Bach Cantatas, Musica Antiqua Koln performs Gluck’s Trio Sonatas… and there is much more.
Happy listening!
Friday, March 28th, 2008
A recent discovery of a phonautogram in France’s patent office reveals what seems to be the earliest recording of a human voice. Created by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1859, the “recording” — a collection of sound waves transcribed on paper — is of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune.”
The full story of the discovery was featured in a front-page story in the New York Times today, and the recording itself may be heard at: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/.
Friday, March 14th, 2008
DRAM has had some reports about Mac users having difficulty with Quicktime and DRAM. If you are a Mac user and find yourself unable to stream music from DRAM, or if your browser crashes after closing the pop-up player window, you might need to download a different version of Quicktime. See DRAM’s announcement for details and fixes for this problem.