Poetry
- LINKpoems - A new form of interactive
poetry? Move from line to line through hyperlinks; if you
get trapped, just use the back button on your browser:
- Sestinas - I was
introduced to this form by the poet Ted Bookey, although
I had previously encountered several sestinas and been
intrigued by them without knowing what I was looking at.
What is a sestina? For all kinds of information and lots
of sestinas, check out the
Sestina
Page. Or go directly to some great
individual poems, such as Ezra Pound's
Sestina: Altaforte or
Elizabeth Bishop's
Sestina or this
satirical All-American Sestina. Once I
knew the structure, I started writing my own. Here is
one, called Just a Sestina, where I set myself the
challenge of adhering not only to the end-word rotation, but giving each
successive line in a stanza one more syllable than the previous, starting
with one syllable in the first line.
- Alice James Books - poetry
cooperative housed at UMF.
Visual
arts
-
A Humument - Once while browsing at
Barnes and Noble, I was struck by the cover of Letter
Arts
magazine, and on opening it discovered this remarkable
work. Artist Tom Phillips took a Victorian novel, A
Human Document, and transformed it
into something totally new -- A HumanDocument -- by painting over each
page, allowing only carefully chosen words to show
through, and thereby creating a strange story, told
through these remaining words and the brilliant
illustrations. This site has reproductions of many of the
pages, as well as lots of other interesting information
and images.
- Ray Troll - He does
fish, beautifully rendered but put into strange settings.
The first thing you see on visiting this site is one of
his classics: a fish in a dark sky with a multitude of
human hands reaching up in supplication. The caption
reads, "Fish worship: is it wrong?"
- JSG Boggs - Meticulous
drawings of currency in a variety of denominations,
usually with subtle and humorous alterations, used as
payment by Boggs in actual negotiated transactions, i.e.,
"Will you accept this drawing of a ten-dollar bill
in payment for this meal?" Interesting philosophical
and legal implications (is this counterfeiting?) which
were explored in depth in a New
Yorker profile some years back. Here are some
beautiful reproductions.
Composition
-
Arts Journal - a daily digest of
arts and cultural journalism.
- American Composers Forum - one of the finest composers
organizations, advocating for American Music and its
living composers, and sponsoring a variety of wonderful
projects including Continental Harmony, which commissioned new
works for communities in each of the fifty states, with
Maine's community being Farmington! Lots of good links here
to other music sites.
- Society of Composers, Inc. - another
excellent composers organization. It is especially
valuable for its national and regional meetings, which
bring composers together to hear performances of one
another's music in veritable concert orgies which may
offer as many as 100 compositions in three or four days.
- American Music Center - central
repository and resource for American music, especially
that of concert composers. The center maintains a large
library of scores and tapes by living composers.
- Sibelius Music Notation Software - This is
fast, easy to learn, intelligent. The quality of the
output may not quite measure up to Score (my notation
program of choice), but it's far superior to Finale.
- Cakewalk - We use this very powerful music
sequencing program in the Computer Music Composition
class I teach at UMF. Highly recommended.
- C. Alan Publications - Publisher
of band and percussion music, including two pieces of
mine: Morning Star and Evening's Sabres.
General
Music sLinks
Esoteric
Music sLinks
- North American Guild of Change
Ringers - I first
learned about change ringing through Dorothy Sayers's Nine
Tailors. In 1998 my wife and I were
fortunate enough to attend an evening rehearsal of change
ringers in a nice old church in the Cotswolds. Later that
summer, when I began the composition of my ballet Holly and Ivy, I decided
to incorporate several change ringing methods into the
music for the street scenes. My principal resource was
the Visual
Method Archive (worth exploring simply
for the mathematical beauty of the diagrams). For a good
explanation of change ringing, check out this site.
- Didjeridu - When I
started studying didjeridu with Stuart Dempster about
twenty-five years ago, it was a relatively uncommon
instrument. Now, however, it is becoming more and more
well known, appearing in non-Aboriginal settings such as
Irish folk music, and in such bands as Dr. Didg and
Outback. The link at the head of this paragraph is to the
didgeridoo webring. But you may want to get started with
some nice photographs and a
basic tutorial.
- Experimental Musical
Instruments - all kinds of information
about unusual instruments, including instructions for
construction, articles about the work of specific
instrument makers, acoustical principles, etc. A
wonderful site.
- American Gamelan Institute
Jazz
sLinks
- Great Day in Harlem - remarkable
film documentary of the largest single gathering of great
jazz musicians ever, assembled on a Harlem street by Art
Kane for his historic photograph.
- Contemporary List of Jazz
Links
- WNUR-FM JazzWeb
- Red Hot and Cool Jazz - As this
site loads, your computer will whisper
"jazz..."
- Swedish Jazz Web
- NEW
JazzPlus -
- NEW All About Jazz - an extensive site. There
is a column written by Teri Harllee on women jazz
musicians called "The Jazz Wench." A page on Ken
Burns's jazz includes numerous reviews and other
commentary, including a satirical takeoff that has Burns saying, "The
reason I made Jazz is I wanted to see if I could make a
documentary that felt longer than the history of jazz
itself, and yet still leave out half the great people
because 'there wasn't enough time.'"
- NEW Blues and Jazz Discography
Links
- this is a HUGE collection of links to discographies all
over the web, most having to do either with specific
artists or labels. For example, page 1 lists three
separate sites for Albert Ayler.
- NEW The Hard Bop Homepage - a really
nice feature of this site is a chronological list of the
hundred greatest hard bop albums, with, for most of them,
photos of the album covers, lists of tracks with timings,
personnel, and fairly extensive commentary.
- Trombone Page of the World - I couldn't resist
including this link. It's an amazing site.
MIDI
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