Fun / Music

Classical Music


Classical music is alive--and downright lively--on the Web. Home pages devoted to individual composers are springing up idiosyncratically, with Shostakovich pages far outnumbering those for poor old Beethoven. This music has long been wrapped in enough stuffy scholarship to choke it, and you'll have no problem finding, say, the symphonies of Mahler explained in mind-numbing detail. But the better sites are taking advantage of the Net's multimedia capabilities to let you hear and see what some of this music is all about.

The Best

Want to sell something via the Internet? First you've got to establish a presence. BMG Classics knows this, and under the inviting title Welcome to the World of Classical Music you'll find a BMG-specific site that encompasses the RCA Red Seal catalogue, Catalyst (BMG's contemporary classical music label), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, and Melodiya. Pages are designed with a pleasing mix of graphics and text with easy-to-follow road maps for your travels. Start by visiting the Introduction and Software page, where you'll find an MPEG audio player; win free CDs by answering questions in the contest area ("Which 'Living Stereo' artist was dubbed 'Mr. Stereo'?" is a typical stumper.); and browse through a massive catalogue of artists to see who's recorded what. Lots of musical examples are there for the downloading, although you'll want a speedy data connection so those half-meg transfers don't hang you up for half an hour. Great try-before-you-buy information here, but there's no on-line product ordering facility yet.

Jan Hanford's J.S. Bach Home Page has a fairly plain front end, but it opens kaleidoscopically to give information about the composer's life and works illustrated by many pictures and musical examples. It's nicely organized and well-written, although you can end up getting dumped into long catalogues of works if you don't browse carefully. The biographical material is more than enough for your standard research paper, and, for the music itself, you link to the Bach page of Pierre R. Schwob's Classical MIDI Archives. There you can download and play MIDI versions of all of Bach's major instrumental works. Many worthwhile links to related sites are listed along the way.

The Classical Music Home Page is the formidable work of Dave Lampson, who divides his site into Building Repertoire, a Classical CD Buying Guide, Recommended Classical CDs, and Composer Data. But wait--there's more! Each section is further divided, typically by chronological era or instrumental combination, ultimately leading to an impressive composer-by-composer tour, with biographies and a list of major works. No pictures or musical examples, but the texts are short and helpful and you'll find good links to other sites in the right places.

The Rest

Classic CD is the Web extension of a magazine that includes an audio CD of musical excerpts with each issue. The monthly editorial content is available on-line with appropriate illustrations, and it's a good place for the novice to start, but where are those music samples? A list of fan clubs turns out to be only addresses--no links to the many Web pages that would be appropriate. This site needs to continue evolving from its magazine roots.

Many orchestras now have home pages, and one of the best-looking (and most fully realized) is that of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra , which introduces the concerts, players, gossip, and that ubiquitous collection of viola jokes. You can even hear the group play the New Zealand National Anthem. More sound files would be a treat, and you'll long for more scholarly articles in the happy-go-lucky vein of the rest of the page. But a great supply of musicians' jokes lurks within. Also a good place to find links to other orchestras.

Allegro is a distributor of many fine independent record labels, a lot of them classical, and the Web site highlights a sampling of those recordings with jacket art and audio excerpts. Nice multimedia work, but there's not much of it, and you're eventually sent to the Courier-typeface bulletin and catalogue pages.

Classical music tends to suffer when corporations put together hip-looking sites. Sony should show more respect for the impressive catalogue built by Columbia Masterworks. As it is, all of the music is combined into artist or multimedia categories, which only get split into genres much further along. By the time you get to the classical artists roster, you'll find it uninformative and incomplete. Where's Leonard Bernstein?

Many composers are honored with home pages; the Ralph Vaughan Williams page is informative without being dry, worshipful without being hagiographic. Musical examples are needed, but page author Jaron Collis has a friendly, modest writing style, which counts for a lot.

Five Guides to Recorded Classical Music is linked all over the Net, so you're bound to hit it in your travels. But it's just a review of reviews, a minimalist exploit not even worthy of Steve Reich. You'll find info about The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection, the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs, the Gramophone Good CD Guide, and The Record Shelf Guide to Classical Repertoire. The reviews are even fussier than the guides themselves.

Classical Music Online is new and ambitious. And under construction, a process that may be hampered by the fees being charged for listings. As of a few weeks ago, nobody had signed up to be listed on the Artists, Agents, and Composers page. Under Classical CD Titles, What's Hot! displays two CDs, on obscure labels--but with lots of info and an audio clip for each. Fewer fees and more information is what's needed for now.

by Byron Nilsson

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995