Music & Vision's monthly column -
KEITH BRAMICH writes:

Thank you to everyone who has replied to our request for material for this column. As always, it's fascinating to know what's happening out there. Here are the first fruits of your feedback.

A Hanns Eisler real audio tour

For almost 30 years the German composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) was the closest musical collaborator of playright Bertold Brecht, writing music for seven Brecht plays and over a hundred songs and poems. Eisler and Brecht also developed theories about the social function of art.

Eisler lived in the USA for ten years from 1938, writing music for Hollywood, but left under the shadow of the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected communist subversive, and is almost forgotten there. A smart new website produced by the North American Hanns Eisler Society should help to rectify this. It includes a virtual tour in streaming Real Audio (select 'music' and then 'tour') which should give visitors a sense of the composer's entire career.

www.EislerMusic.com

Robert Avalon

Wayne Dockery of the Foundation for Modern Music, Houston, writes with news of the American composer and pianist Robert Avalon. I've corresponded a little with Robert, and unfortuately narrowly missed meeting him at a concert last year in London. He has an ensemble based in Amsterdam, so I guess he'll be a frequent visitor to Europe. Basil Ramsey reviewed one of Robert's CDs last year for M&V, and there's now an Avalon website, including downloadable mp3 samples of his music (select 'listen', choose 'chamber' or 'orchestral' and then select 'track list') and Musings -- a changing series of the composer's original essays.

www.robertavalon.com

Juozas Rimas

Lithuanian oboist Juozas Rimas (born 1942) is also Professor of woodwinds at the Lithuanian Academy of Music, and invites us to sample a slightly unusual approach to oboe music, at a site containing a vast repertoire of oboe music, both arranged and original. The 'click here for instructions' link actually takes you to Rimas's mp3 station Oboe radio.

artists.mp3s.com/artists/141/juozas_rimas.html

Mp3 trios

The Mallorca-based Serafino Piano Trio maintains an area of mp3.com featuring the complete piano trios of Foote, Beethoven, Brahms and Haydn, plus other music, including Dvorák and Granados.

www.mp3.com/serafinotrio

Wallace De Pue

All the vocal works of American composer Wallace De Pue are described in detail online, including the supposed level of difficulty, and De Pue offers to send a copy of any choral work or song to any interested party. I couldn't find any sound samples on the De Pue site, however.

mustec.bgsu.edu/~wallace

Robert Hugill

British composer Robert Hugill maintains a website with extensive extracts of his music, in both MIDI and downloadable mp3 formats. If you're on a slow link to the net, the MIDI files download and begin playing very quickly.

www.hugill.demon.co.uk

Enough from me for this month. Please keep the feedback coming in for our next MV3 feature on 5 March. Now though, live from a weather balloon suspended over the Antarctic :) here's Gordon Rumson on self-promotion and the web ...

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