It is Christmas Day and I have waited until the last possible minute to write this article (Maria sweats out these deadlines with me I'm sure (-: ). Surrounded by music and carols and knowing that this January we would receive training in Sibelius, I turned my ear to that pleasant task.
Since I seldom stay on track (the puns will get worse) I want to tell you about my recent experience with a Philips CDR775 Dual Deck CD Recorder. The news: it works! I made an audio CD from an audio tape, I am making progress on "saving" my vinyl records to CDs and even made a CD of upbeat oldies for my water aerobics class. (I am retired you know!)
On a different note, here are some sites and information that you may find music to your ears. On the Sibelius homepage you will find a link to MENC:the National Association for Music Education - http://www.menc.org/guides/wlc/WLCFront.html Sibelius and MENC have partnered for the first time to offer orchestral arrangements for the World's Largest Concert® March 13, 2003 at 1pm. To view, play and print them for free, follow the instructions but know in advance that you will probably need the free plug-in, SCORCH. It worked well for me and there are other product demos available from the homepage. At this website - http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/ - you'll find scores of scores in a variety of instruments and genres.
Sibelius isn't the only game in town. Tara Higgins describes - http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr404.shtml - how she used the free and easy Finale Notepad - http://www.codamusic.com/coda/np.asp - to help her students create their own compositions. You can hear several examples on this site.
Musical Sites - a minor sampling
• http://B.webring.com/hub?ring=mels&id=1&hub Interesting WebRing for Music Education. This site is the hub of the WebRing. Follow links from there.
• http://www.creatingmusic.com/ What a great tool and so much fun - a must see for classroom and music educators
• http://www.ala.org/parentspage/greatsites/arts.html#c - the ALA's 700 best sites
K-12 Resources
• http://www.isd77.k12.mn.us/resources/staffpages/shirk/k12.music.html - a great list of resources for Band, Choral, Orchestra and Classroom Teachers as well as commercial music resources, MIDI and music technology resources.
• http://www.marcopolosearch.org - search here for appropriate music lesson plans
Music Databases - lyrics, composers, MIDI, MP3, these databases will do it all
• http://eserver.org/music/databases.html - listing of a variety of music databases
• http://hcl.harvard.edu/loebmusic/online-ir-databases.html - databases and information resources
• http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/Audio-Visual/Stinson/medmusic.htm -
Medieval Music Database
• http://www.lib.duke.edu/music/resources/databases.html - 60 databases, web pages containing thousands of classical music sound files in MIDI format as well as collections of music-related images.
• http://www.lib.washington.edu/music/webdbases.html - history, lyrics, music
• http://music.acu.edu/www/iawm/ - Women's Early Music, Art; women in music resources
• http://www.music.indiana.edu/music_resources/ - World Wide Music Resources