Music Online

Free Download: Viotti's Violin Concerto No. 22 in A minor

Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824) was an Italian violinist and composer, known as the father of the modern French school of violin performance in the 19th century. He wrote mostly for the violin, including string quartets, trios and concerti, but he did compose songs for voice and piano in the early 1800's.

This violin concerto is performed by Lola Bobesco, violin and the Rhine Palatinate Orchestra; Kurt Redel, conductor.

Download this work now through October 6, 2009.

Free Download: Josquin des Prez's Deploration sur la mort d'Ockeghem

Josquin composed this chanson in 1497 in response to the death of Johannes Ockeghem, a skilled composer of the French chanson.

This recording is performed by A Sei Voci.

Download this work now through September 22, 2009.

Featured Playlist: Doo Dah Days!

One of the best-loved features of Music Online is the ability to create and share playlists. Every month, we feature a different playlist and interview its author with an eye toward sharing library promotion tips and teaching aids that you can replicate in your library. If you have a playlist you’d like us to consider featuring, please email us at music@alexanderstreet.com.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Cathy Chaparro is the author of this month’s featured playlist, which she created in conjunction with the Pittsburgh-area annual Stephen Foster Music and Heritage Festival, “Doo Dah Days.”

“I created the playlist to go with a Web page on Stephen Foster that we had been thinking about for some time, since Stephen Foster was born in Pittsburgh, and the local neighborhood of Lawrenceville celebration is in July each year.”

Chaparro’s playlist includes 15 recordings of works by the man considered to be America’s first professional composer, as performed by a wide range of artists, including Angelina Baker, Wayne Erbsen, and Pete Seeger. Recordings in the playlist include “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “Swanee River,” as well as Chaparro’s current favorite, “Nelly Bly,”—“because,” says Chaparro, “it’s such a lively tune, and I like the journalist who was given that pen name after the Foster tune.”

Chaparro also took advantage of the Alexander Street playlist functionality that let her include materials from anywhere on the Web, linking out to other Stephen Foster Web resources, such as the official Doo Dah Days Web site, and Stephen Foster’s 1851 Sketchbook, hosted on the Web site of The Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh, which is the principal repository for materials pertaining to Foster.

The result of Chaparro’s efforts is a fun and incredibly rich multi-media guide that will be of use both to the local Pittsburgh community and to anyone with an interest in Stephen Collins Foster.

For help creating a playlist like Cathy Chaparro’s for your library, access our Music Online playlist tutorial—it will walk you through the fundamentals of creating, annotating, and sharing playlists. You can also upload the tutorial and make it available to users on your library Web site so that they can create playlists of their favorite recordings.