Music Website News

with Keith Bramich

Musical orgies at WHRB

The Harvard radio station WHRB Boston/Cambridge is known for inventing the 'musical orgy' - a twice-yearly marathon-style programme dedicated to a single composer, genre, performer or subject. The next in this series is the Bach Orgy in January - ten days beginning on Sunday 9th during which the entire musical output of J S Bach will be played uninterrupted, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Bach's death.

WHRB is available live on the internet, both at 20kbps (suitable for most dial-up phone connections) and at 96kbps - a high quality feed for those with a broadband connection. Why not listen now whilst you're reading the rest of this article? Their broadcasting encompasses classical music, jazz and underground rock. WHRB use Windows Media Player streaming, and you may need to download a player or a codec before you can listen. Instructions via the WHRB website.

Met Opera Broadcasts

The new season of radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera New York is beginning, and you can see the coming season's schedule on-line. The broadcasts are available in Australia, Europe, New Zealand and the US from various radio stations. If your local station doesn't carry the broadcasts, you can listen on-line via WHRB above.

EMJ On-line

Aimed at music and college teachers, academics, professional and amateur musicians, pupils and music lovers, the European Music Journal or EMJ is a new internet-journal for music and musical education. Publishers Prof Dr Wilfried Gruhn, Prof Dr Siegmund Helms and Prof Dr Reinhard Scheider are creating a forum for teaching music within the medium of the internet. The design is clear and distinctive, and uses musical rest symbols for navigation. The content appears to be available in German, English, French and Italian, although various snippets of German kept appearing in the English version whilst I was exploring. Early days yet though ...

Melody Assistant

An inexpensive scoring program Melody Assistant is available (for both Mac and PCs) from Myriad Online. Besides working with music notation, it can sample and edit sounds. Apparently the program's printed output, built-in sounds and templates are less than ideal, but it is still very good value for money. From the same company, Harmony Assistant works with MIDI input (and is more costly).

To read web-based user feedback before you buy either product, visit the discussion forums for Melody Assistant and for Harmony Assistant.

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