New Resource – Music Online

The Library now has a subscription to Music Online, which includes three databases of streaming music – African American Song, Classical Music Library, and Smithsonian Global Sound.

African American Song covers jazz, blues, gospel, and other forms of African American musical expression. From the earliest recordings of Afro-American music made in the late 19th century to performances of the mid-1970s, in most instances the full recorded works of each artist are presented. Includes Duke Ellington, Sophie Tucker, Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Sarah Vaughn, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Big Joe Williams, Memphis Jug Band, Roosevelt Sykes, Dizzy Gillespie, Chicago River Kings, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Blind Willie McTell, Lonnie Johnson, Alberta Jones, Johnny Shines, Memphis Minnie, and hundreds of others.

Classical Music Library includes tens of thousands of licensed recordings in an ever-growing, fully searchable classical music resource. The audio selections are cross-referenced to a database of supplementary reference information. Selections range from the earliest Gregorian chants to works by modern composers—including symphonic music, vocal and instrumental music, choral works, and other forms.

Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions. The database includes more than 35,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds. The collection is an outgrowth of the vision and work of Folkways Records’ founder Moses Asch, who created a veritable encyclopedia of the human experience of sound, releasing more than 2,000 albums between 1948 and 1986, including those by American folk icons such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and countless influential others. The collection also encompasses animal sounds, beer-drinking at an African homestead; calypso; classical violin instruction; drama; poetry; sounds of the deep ocean, the office, and the ionosphere; a frog being eaten by a snake; and great performances of traditional music from virtually everywhere in the world.

For all three of these databases, users can create playlists. The playlists can be copied into e-mails, Blackboard, and used various scenarious of teaching and learning.

Categories: Database, New Resource

Maxwell Music Library Tagged