Slice searching?

A bizarre way to make sense of the net ...

The classical music area of the net is now so large that it's very difficult to see more than a thin 'slice' of the sites available, when searching or browsing. However, a rather bizarre technique can be used to cut slices at strange angles through the CM cake ...

Take the search term 'classical music' (or any other of your choice, but preferably one which returns many hundreds of thousands of results at the big engines) and ask your favourite search engine to search for this term plus another, unrelated word. So, for example, search for 'classical music' and 'green' (or 'stone', or 'szentendre' or 'mushroom' or 'philology'). This can be achieved quite easily at Altavista, for example, by using the search term (e.g.) +"classical music" +green or at Google by using the advanced search page ('green' in the 'with any of the words' box and 'classical music' in the 'with the exact phrase' box). It can be quite fun. If you find anything really interesting, please let us know.

Returning to what is possibly an equally bizarre way to find websites, we continue M&V's journey, one year on, through the results of the Chamber Music America February 2000 survey of the top 50 classical music websites.

At position 20, Gramofile is the archive of classical music reviews from 1983 until two months ago. For their latest reviews, you must buy the Gramophone magazine. An incredible archive of over 25,000 reviews is available online, free of charge, and can also be bought as a CD ROM. The GramoFile on the Web link is no longer valid at its original gramofile.co.uk location, but it can be accessed via the Gramophone magazine website.

www.gramophone.co.uk/reviews/

Global Music Network or GMN, at position 19, is a heavily funded classical and jazz webcast site with many many hours of music, both live and recorded, and trying hard to become a news and information portal for anything jazz and classical.

www.gmn.com

Classical Music on the Web UK, edited by Rob Barnett, and with contributions from Peter Grahame Woolf and many other writers, is at 18, with a huge site based on British music, with frequent additions -- concert reviews, CD reviews and articles -- and built over a number of years by webmaster Len Mullenger, originally at Coventry University, then force9, then (via musicweb.uk.net) vavo.com! If only this site would stay in one place, it might become even more popular than it currently is!

www.musicweb.uk.net

At 17, Brave New Works, founded in 1997 by Christopher Froh, Chris Younghoon Kim and Eli Shapiro, is a group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, which promotes new music by promoting concerts, workshops and collaborations.

www-personal.umich.edu/~cyoungk/

The Art Music Web Ring, 16, is a collection of 200 classical sites, collected together by Charles K Moss and navigable or searchable using the webring system, which links the sites together in a large circle, from which one can hop from one to the next.

nav.webring.yahoo.com/hub?ring=artmusic&index

Also by Charles Moss, The Carolina Classical Connection at 15 is page of links to various classical sites, and also interesting to explore.

www.classicalmus.hispeed.com/links.html

The Classical Music Department of the WWW Virtual Library attained position 14 -- a large site maintained by Gary Daum and the Georgetown Preparatory School in the USA, and kept very well up-to-date, considering its size. Most of the pages are pure text and hyperlinks, making it very fast to load. To see the full extent of what they've put together, view their full catalogue.

www.gprep.org/classical/

From Tucson Arizona, USA, Acoustic Digest is a site presented 'for good music lovers on the WWW', specialising in classical and new acoustic music. Traversing the site, reading the information on composers, artists, works and a historical almanac, one seems to hop between several free servers and several styles of page. The site's trademark runs the two words of the name together, capitalising the central CD in the middle of the word.

www.suresite.com/az/a/acousticd/

At position 12, a site entitled simply Internet Music Index is a very plain page, with nine blue text links on a white background, sharing with gprep.org above the look of the very early world wide web, from 1995-ish, when most pages looked like this.

www.u.arizona.edu/~rcampbel/

Music Services, University of Oregon, at 11, couldn't be more different, with a modern portal view into the music area of the University of Oregon Library System, creating the effect of an efficient and up-to-date service.

libweb.uoregon.edu/music/

Continue >>