Site Seeing

Music Website News

with KEITH BRAMICH

How on earth can anyone be expected to follow Peter Dale, and his fantastic Survivor's Guide published here this month, Basil? Oh well, I'll give it a try ...

Free Newsletter

Music & Vision's August newsletter was published at the beginning of the month. If you haven't already received your copy by email, our autoresponder is waiting to send you a copy, which should be with you within minutes - just follow the instructions on our newsletters page. Music & Vision and its newsletter are, of course, completely free. All we ask is that you tell all your friends and associates about us :)

The spirit of the internet, of course, is to provide everything free of charge, and the first few items in this week's selection demonstrate this in action.

Free CD corner

Thomas Oboe Lee is promoting his work as a composer by offering a free CD from his website at www.thomasoboelee.com.

Music Timeline website has a Name that tune quiz - download a MIDI file, listen and guess the composer and the name of the piece. Email the webmaster your entry - the prize is a classical CD.

You may be able to win a copy of the 1999 BBC Proms double CD by taking part in their acronym quiz. When I last looked, the current quiz ended yesterday, but there could be something new by now.

Mp3.com, who are quickly making a name for themselves as the site for MPEG format music, are giving away a free sampler CD, although there is a small charge to send it to addresses outside of the USA. To order a copy, visit www.mp3.com/freecd/.

As far as we're aware, all the free CD offers we mentioned last month are still available.

Free sheet music

Opportunities abound for obtaining sheet music over the net - here are a couple of free downloads. A few months ago Music & Vision published Richard Graves' article about the strange history of Debussy's Morceau de Concours, including a download of the Morceau.

ChoralWeb publishing are offering you a free piece of choral music (with optional sacred or secular texts) at www.choralweb.com .

A gospel-jazz style harmonisation of the universally known and loved passion chorale melody O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (O Sacred Head) for SATB a capella is available for free at Music for the Church in the New Millennium - home.earthlink.net/~bgoldes.

GNU LilyPond

Sometimes it's surprising just what you can find for free on the net. The GNU Project specialises in freely available computer software produced by teams of volunteers, and is known for its excellent programming language compilers and operating systems. GNU make the source code for their projects freely available, so with some computer knowledge you can build versions for even obscure types of computer.

LilyPond is the GNU Project's music typesetter - it produces beautiful sheet music from an input file in a high-level description language. You don't have to be a computer expert to use LilyPond. Pre-packaged versions are available for i386 and PPC. Further information is at www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/lilypond/

Quantum Portal

'an alternative approach that harnesses the calculating power of the computer in partnership with the creativity of a human' - Quantum Portal is Ray Watson's generative MIDI composer, which generates his (and your) surreal music from a scripting language. Don't let me put you off before visiting www.quantumportal.com though! Some software may be offered free.

Copyright © Keith Bramich, August 3rd 1999