Individual Article:
Three diverse collections of music can be streamed to office or home
Three new audio collections, Naxos Music Library, Smithsonian Global Sound, and the Database of Recorded American Music, are now available to the Northwestern University community. These online services provide streamed access to a wide spectrum of American music, contemporary music, works from the standard concert repertoire, plus representative recordings of traditional music from around the world. With more than 172,500 selections of music and spoken word material, these audio collections will be of interest to multiple disciplines, including American studies, history, anthropology, and music. They are the first audio collections to be accessible outside the university’s Blackboard system and will complement the thousands of tracks streamed by Digital Media Services for course reserves.
Naxos Music Library includes the entire Naxos and Marco Polo catalogs, including all new releases. Naxos is famous for its unusually broad repertoire, and has expanded upon this by the addition of specialty labels such as Arc and Celestial Harmonies, with world music anthologies and reissues of 20th-century premieres on the First Edition label. Two ongoing series, American Classics and Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, demonstrate the range of music available through Naxos. Based in Hong Kong, Naxos also features Chinese music, both classical and folk.
Smithsonian Global Sound includes the legendary Folkways collection, co-founded by Moses Asch in 1948 to document the entire world of sound: "people's music," spoken word, and music from around the globe. Additional components include music recorded for the International Library of African Music, and material collected on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology.
The goal of the Database of Recorded American Music is to collect the widest possible spectrum of American music for educational use and scholarly research. At its core is New World Records, created to document the history of American music, with additional labels such as Composers’ Recordings, Inc., Chicago’s own Cedille Records, Deep Listening and innova.
Links to all three collections are conveniently located on the Music Library’s web site, http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/ . All three collections provide numerous access points such as composer, cultural group, title, instrument, or genre, as well as liner notes. Naxos Music Library and Smithsonian Global Sound provide static URLs, which may be added to Blackboard course web sites. For example, http://northwestern2.classical.com/permalink/recording/2147517683/ should lead directly to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” by Cleo Kennedy and the Birmingham Movement Choir. For something completely different, try Naxos’s Grammy-nominated recording of Kenneth Fuch’s Eventide: http://northwestern.naxosmusiclibrary.com/stream.asp?s=38099%2fnorthwestern02%2f559224%5f02 As usual, off-campus access requires authentication via the University's Virtual Private Network.
As this is a new type of service, we welcome comments and would appreciate learning of any difficulties in their use. Please contact Jeanette L. Casey, public services librarian, at jlcasey@northwestern.edu.
Jeanette Casey