Captain Pearl R. Nye was a man cut from a bit of different cloth, and his life and the music he loved so dearly are celebrated as part of this wonderful online collection created by the staff members of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. Nye was born in 1872 and raised on a canal boat on the Ohio and Erie Canal. He was committed to preserving the songs and stories that were part of...

During the 1930s and 1940s, teams of writers and scholars scoured the United States on behalf of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) collecting materials about the places they saw and the people they met. This particular digital ethnographic field collection brings together materials which document the Arabic, Bahamian, Cuban, Green, Seminole and Slavic cultures across Florida. Here visitors...

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 Exploratorium is in San Francisco's Palace of the Fine Arts, and contains science, art, and human perception exhibits. It has long promoted museums, including its own, as informal learning centers. The 40th anniversary of the Exploratorium is, in part, being honored with monthly podcasts of the radio series Speaking of Music, that ran from 1983-1992. Prominent musicians were interviewed in...

Theo Wangemann was the world's first professional sound recordist, and was hired by Thomas Edison in 1888 to produce a set of musical recordings for the wax cylinder phonograph. Wangemann worked at Edison's West Orange, New Jersey laboratory in 1888-89. Interestingly enough, Wangemann is perhaps best known (until now) for his work recording Johannes Brahms at the piano in 1889. In 2011, the...

To sit down with a group of friends to sing and play musical instruments qualifies as a great experience for many, and humans have reveled in such get-togethers for millennia. This beautiful digital collection from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress presents 100 sound recordings from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College in Georgia. The recordings primarily consist of...

Under the direction of Monk Rowe, Hamilton College has built an amazing collection of interviews with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers, and critics. The college started collecting all of these interviews back in 1995, and since that time they have interviewed over 300 people. First-time visitors will note that each interview includes an audio file of the conversation, a photograph of the...

Profiles: Alessandro D'Ausilio http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/alessandro-dausilio/ Karajan Centrum http://www.karajan.org/jart/prj3/karajan/main.jart?reserve-mode=active&rel=en Herbert von Karajan: Rehearsal of Schumann's 4th Symphony http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shc-4AZVaNk Teaching the art of conducting an...

Over the past few years, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has conducted a plethora of interviews with America's distinguished roster of talented authors, musicians, painters, and other creative types. A new podcast is released each Thursday, and visitors can browse the offerings here by date or alphabetically. Some of the more recent interviewees include George Wein (noted jazz concert...

This remarkable collection from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress brings together an amazing set of traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia. The folklorist Alan Jabbour recorded Lyn in 1966 and 1967, and the tunes here "represent the music and evoke the history and spirit of Virginia's Appalachian frontier." The collection contains 184 original...