National Network for Equitable Library Service

The history of opera, illustrated by over 100 musical examples by Naxos artists and other singers.

From Gregorian Chant to Henryk Gorecki, here is the fascinating story of over a thousand years of Western classical music and composers. Polyphony, sonata form, serial music and other terms are explained with 150 accompanying music excerpts.

In the 1950s and ’60s, co-operative jazz clubs opened their doors in Canada in response to new forms of jazz expression emerging after the war and the lack of performance spaces outside major urban centres. Operated by the musicians themselves, these hip new clubs created spaces where jazz musicians practised their art. Live at the Cellar looks at this unique period in the development of jazz in Canada.

Previously, artificial neural networks have been used to capture only the informal properties of music. However, cognitive scientist Michael Dawson found that by training artificial neural networks to make basic judgments concerning tonal music, such as identifying the tonic of a scale or the quality of a musical chord, the networks revealed formal musical properties that differ dramatically from those typically presented in music theory.

Johnson' s focus is on the music--Mozart' s wondrous output of composition and his uncanny gift for instrumentation. Liszt once said that Mozart composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. Mozart' s gift and skill with instruments was also remarkable as he mastered all of them except the harp. For example, no sooner had the clarinet been invented and introduced than Mozart began playing and composing for it.

A panoramic experience that tells the story of Beastie Boys, an audiobook as unique as the band itself. Formed as a New York City hardcore band in 1981, Beastie Boys struck an unlikely path to global hip hop superstardom. Here is their story, told for the first time in the words of the band. Adam "ADROCK" Horovitz and Michael "Mike D" Diamond offer revealing and very funny accounts of their transition from teenage punks to budding rappers. For more than thirty years, this band has had an inescapable and indelible influence on popular culture.

Hearing, the first of our senses to develop in the womb, is also the most recent of our senses to appear in evolutionary terms. This episode explores how sound is produced and transmitted, how the human ear is designed to receive certain frequencies, and whether the physics of relative frequencies, together with the physical structure of the human ear, makes us hear some combinations of sounds more ‘deeply’ than others. We investigate how the brain interprets music, and why we hear some sounds as music; other sounds as noise.

Four centuries ago... did people listen in a different way than we do now? How different were the sounds that they heard? And can we tune into their auditory world? Tracking down ancient sounds that still exist, evoking some which have become extinct, this acoustic film imagines the noises of Elizabethan society through the ears of those who listened four centuries ago.

A centuries-old caroling tradition takes place during Christmas and New Year's in a small Newfoundland outport. The carols and their tunes have been handed down through the ages in the community's oral tradition, and there is no written transcription of the melodies or their origins. For generations villagers have walked from house to house, entered darkened kitchens after midnight, and sung the carols as occupants listened in the darkness.

The story of a wayfaring music. A trio of Canadian folk musicians get together with their English counterparts to trace the roots of traditional melodies that travelled across the Atlantic with early settlers centuries ago. In North America the tunes evolved and changed. Now these musicians bring them back to see how they fit in their original "home." The documentary travels with them to Devon for a series of concerts and comparisons, tracing the relationship between old and modern fishing cultures on both sides of the Atlantic through a fascinating musical genealogy.