Site Seeing Special

Composers on the web

with KEITH BRAMICH

Perfect Sound Forever

American/Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow is famous for his distinctive player piano studies - mostly unplayable by real pianists because the rhythms use irrational numbers, the glissandi and arpeggii are too fast for real fingers, and far too many notes are played at once for any normal combination of human fingers. You can read more about this intriguing composer at Perfect Sound Forever, which is yet another online music magazine - 'Conlon Nancarrow - Personality & polyphony: his life and music'.

Metaphysician of Music

Michael Stewart's new website provides the only on-line information about the life and works of the remarkable 20th century Greek composer Jani Christou (1926-1970). The information here is well-written, well-designed and very clear.

Gerard Schurmann

Launched in May this year, composer and conductor Gerard Schurmann's website now contains a couple of music extracts in RealAudio (on the news page). Schurmann's complete works catalogue, an appreciation of his film music by David Wishart, a biography by Earl Tomson and a selection of reviews can also be seen at www.gerard-schurmann.com.

Laurence Armstrong Hughes

Contemporary British composer Laurence Armstrong Hughes has a new website at www.lah.freeuk.com/laurence.htm containing a CV, worklist, biographical material, photos, a music journal, and soon to include scores and sound files.

Unknown composers

The unknown composers page lists classical music which, for whatever reason, isn't heard and should be. It's a series of presentations by authors such as Steve Schwartz and Luis Alfonso, covering various areas of the repertoire. http://kith.org/jimmosk/index.html.

composer.co.uk

The British Composers Project is at www.composer.co.uk. It could be a bad time to visit Brigid Scott Baker's site, which is currently moving here from its old home on the 'MusicNow' site.

Amazing Secrets Composers Use ...

'Dedicated to helping the successful musician find success in his own life time', the Living Music Foundation's website is at http://www.e-universe.com/lmfhome/. They will soon be using streaming audio to allow visitors to listen to their CDs.

Mozart Among Us?

Trombonist Glen C. Ford's MAU (or Mozart Among Us) is an interesting 20th century art music site which won a Yahoo Internet Life award in November 1998. It rather looks as if Mr Ford has let things slip a little since then, which is a pity - the 'ConcertFinder' listings section is six months out of date, for example. The section marked 'The Musicians' has good biographical information about a number of contemporary composers, though, and at 'Listening' there is 6 Mb of downloadable music in mp3 format. www.io.com/~glenford/MAU.html.

Music Detective

Composer, music detective, analyst and educator Craig Shoemaker has a site containing much discussion of scores (at various levels), and information about 'The Art of Music Composition and Orchestration' at www.musc.net/esoteric.

Twelve Tone Toy Box

Composer Matt Fields' TwelveToneToyBox is worth a look, if you haven't seen it. It's an educational tool using colours, sounds and animations. You'll need Java enabled on your browser, and lots of other things, such as a sound card, lots of memory, and a sense of wonder! Just point your mouse at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fields/TTTB/. - Matt explains all the requirements there.

Finding composers on the web

We're quite often asked how to find information about composers on the web. There are lots of places to look, of course, but here are a few collections. The amount of information provided varies considerably.

Various all-embracing composer databases exist: Joshua Lilley's Composers Page at www.composers.net, the Internet Classical Music Composer Database and Jos Smeets' Classical Composers Database.

Some of the large portal sites, directories and search engines have lists of composers, notably Yahoo.

If you know the name of the composer you want information about, it's best to either start with one of the sites above, or to use one of the search engines.

If you're looking by country, start at the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC) or read our site seeing article about music information centres. There are also several country-specific sites not under the IAMIC umbrella, such as Paul Stanyer's www.hungarian-composers.com.

You'll also find themed sites, for example the Early Women Composers site.

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