Born in Austin, Texas in 1915, Alan Lomax was a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and musician who traveled the United States and the world recording the performances of thousands of musicians, from Jelly Roll Morton and Woody Guthrie to little known folk singers in Haiti. On the Alan Lomax Sound Archive Online readers will find over 17,400 digital audio files, starting with Lomax's 1946 tape...

Based at the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin, the American Sheet Music Collection contains thousands of pieces of sheet music published in the United States before 1900. Many of these items came to the library as gifts, including a significant group of publications that once belonged to composer/publisher Joseph P. Webster. The musical genres included here are impressive, and...

From the library at the Getty Research Institute, The Art of David Tudor is a great example of effective presentation of highlights from rich library and archival collections on the Web. The site complements a symposium held at the Getty Research Institute in 2001: "The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture". Born in 1926, Tudor became an internationally known...

Teaching the arts is, as one might expect, an art in itself, and teachers young and old alike will find much to engage their attention on this delightful website. Created as part of the Annenberg Media's educational resource website, this site offers an eight-part professional development workshop for use by music, theater, dance, and visual art teachers. The site includes all eight of the one...

Music historians and readers who appreciate the novels of Jane Austen may be interested in this digitized collection of sheet music owned by the writer and her family. Here, visitors will find more than twenty "printed and manuscript music books owned by members of the Austen family" dating from "the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Most of these books were created by compiling and...

During the mid-20th century, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival energized the University of California campus by bringing together West Coast folk aficionados. The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project archives and further explores the rich history of the festival. The project takes on many mediums (including in-person programming, a digital archive and exhibit, and audio recordings). Readers may...

Born in New York in 1911, Bernard Herrmann became of the most well-known and respected composers of film music of the 20th century, and many of his scores (including those for Citizen Kane and Psycho) have become regularly performed in concert halls across the world. In 2000, the Bernard Herrmann Society was founded by Gunther Kogebehn and Kurt George Gjerde with the aim of widening appreciation...

Noted bluesman Willie Dixon once said, "The blues are the roots; everything else is the fruits". Wise words indeed, and the quote informs the spirit of Martin Scorsese's PBS documentary series "The Blues". This interactive website provides users with some great material about this seven part series, which features segments by Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders, and of course, Mr. Scorsese. On the site,...

African-American owned enterprises in the South were not unusual phenomena in the early 20th century, but their records are often scattered and fragmentary. Keeping that in mind, this website is made all the more intriguing and useful, both for scholars and the web-browsing public. Created in cooperation with the Digital Library of Georgia and the Middle Georgia Archives, this collection consists...

"The string quartet, for two violins...was one of the most widely-cultivated genres of chamber music during the Classical period, with...Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all contributing substantially to the literature." The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University Library has made available a lovely online collection of sheet music for the string quartet published...