Aaron Copland, born and raised in a small Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, worlds away from the sophistications of Carnegie Hall, helped define American music. His “vernacular” style, honed to perfection in the 1930s and 1940s with ballets like Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo, almost single-handedly reinvented American classical music and shaped such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein...

The Library of Congress' Performing Arts Encyclopedia features a large collection on Coptic Chants, one of the oldest liturgical chants performed today. Visitors unfamiliar with the Copts of Egypt, and their music, should peruse the "Introduction" for an excellent few paragraphs about them. Going back to the menu of Galleries at the top of the homepage, visitors will find the "Music Recordings"...

The Country Music Hall of Fame (last featured in the 06-01-2001 Scout Report) is open for onsite visitors, but for those who are unable to get to Nashville in person, two online exhibits funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities provide a glimpse of its collections. The first, Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City, explores the impact of Bob Dylan's 1960s Nashville...

Linda Martell was the first black woman solo artist to perform at the Grand Ole Opry and three of her singles earned spots on the country charts in the 1960s, yet her name rarely appears alongside contemporaries like Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. This Rolling Stone profile focuses on Martell's career trajectory, beginning in gospel and R&B before blossoming as a country singer billed as the "First...

This tremendous archive at Dartmouth College grew out of a private collection assembled and digitally restored by Professor Alex Hartov. The Jewish Sound Archive Database and website were developed as a collaborative effort between Professor Lewis Glinert and Professor Hartov and several additional colleagues at Dartmouth. Currently, the collection has over 20,000 tracks available for online...

The online presentation of the Miller Flute Collection in the Music Division of the Library of Congress has images of over 1,500 instruments, as well as a 17th-century flageolet tutorial. There is also an impressive array of "Special Presentations", which vary from an explanation what constitutes a flute, in "Flute Misnomers" and "Fife vs. Band Flute" to "Books, Tutors and Patents", which has a...

For those interested in the arts of Greek and Roman terpsichore, dance, and music, the electronic journal Didaskalia will be a welcome find. The journal is an English-language publication that is focused on how these artistic endeavors are performed in contemporary society, and the name comes from the inscriptions used to record the outcomes of drama and music festivals in Athens. The journal was...

The Beethoven-Haus was founded in 1889; the complex in Bonn brings together Beethoven's birthplace with a concert hall and a research center. This website brings together over 6,100 documents, 1,600 files, and 7,600 text files that tell the story of this masterful composer and musician. A good place to start is the Highlights area, where visitors can look over versions of the Pastoral Symphony,...

The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) contains more than 14,000 digital images of medieval and early modern manuscripts of polyphony, the simultaneous performance of multiple melodies. Combining high-quality images of music manuscripts alongside detailed metadata (including Description, Bibliography, Commentary, and Contributors), DIAMM is an extensive resource for scholars and...

Since 1954, the International Mozarteum Foundation has been steadily editing the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and their critical editions have become essential items for musicians and musicologists. This month, they placed the fruits of their collective labors online on this site, and it is truly a glorious achievement. Currently, there are 25,734 pages of music and 8,441 pages of...