Summer brings thoughts of outdoor jazz festivals, and fans of the genre flock to places like Newport and Monterey each year to take in a variety of performances. Since 1958, the pleasant seaside town of Monterey has hosted the Monterey Jazz Festival and their vast archives of performances, ephemera, and other materials are housed at Stanford University's Archive of Recorded Sound. With substantial...

The Monterey Jazz Festival Digital Collection at Stanford University chronicles the longest running jazz festival in the world. Founded in 1958 in the seaside city of Monterey, California, the festival has hosted most of the world's great jazz players. On the home page simply click play to listen to a classic performance by Billie Holiday at the 1958 festival. Other offerings include an inspired...

Mountain Stage, a famous Charleston, West Virginia, venue where folk musicians play, is broadcast on National Public Radio, and can be heard on the NPR website, simply by clicking on "Listen", next to the artist's picture and brief bio. Visitors wishing to read more about the artist's musical history can click on the name of the artist next to their picture. Included in the history is their set...

Musescore is typesetting software for musical scores that supports a wide range of file formats and methods of data entry. In addition to staves, it can also be used to typeset percussion notation, tablature, fretboad diagrams, lyrics, and nearly all features commonly (and uncommonly) encountered in sheet music. Musescore includes style options that can be used to change the layout and appearance...

What is the relationship between the brain and music? That very question animates the Library of Congress' Music and the Brain series, and their website allows interested parties to listen in on some of the conversations, lectures, and symposia. Noted psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison chairs the initiative, and the programs bring together physicians, theorists, composers, and performers. Visitors...

The Music and the Deaf organization was started in England by Paul Whittaker. Whittaker had applied to 12 universities to study music, but was turned down solely because he was deaf. After being accepted at Wadham College at Oxford, and studying at several others, Whittaker started the organization in 1988 in his parent's home. Visitors will find that the website for this one-of-kind...

Art historians and music enthusiasts of all stripes may be interested in checking out the Musical Festivals Database, "a fully-searchable index of programs, personnel, ensembles and venues of musical festivals held between 1695 and 1940." As the team behind this website notes, these festivals were central to eighteenth and nineteenth century British musical culture and reveal changing aesthetic...

"How can mapping change the way we think about music history?" This "deceptively simple" question is posed on the homepage of Musical Geography, a fascinating collection of projects that explore the intersections of music, geography, and time. Musical Geography was launched in 2015 by Louis Epstein, a professor of music and musicology at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Epstein initially...

Music scholars and readers with an affinity for historic musical instruments may be especially interested in Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO): "the world's largest freely accessible database for information on musical instruments held in public collections." This resource began in 2009 as a consortium between a number of European musical instrument museums and is now working on expanding...

In 1707, Hans Sloane published a book entitled Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbadoes, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, in which the European traveler described his time in these islands during the late seventeenth century. Sloane writes of a 1688 music "festival" on the island of Jamaica, which was performed by individuals of African descent. Many of these musicians were survivors of the...