Excerpts from the new music library
“Lau Yiu Kam,” a Chinese aria
“King Zombie,” a Jamaican folksong
Ethiopian dance tune
Movement II of Dvorak’s New World Symphony
“Strange Fruit,” by Billie Holiday
“Kyrie,” from Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame
Put an ear to the library’s new cornucopia of audio files
UC Davis is now home to a powerful new tool that offers students, staff and faculty free access to hundreds of thousands of streaming audio files from sources the world over.
The campus’s new Music Subscription Service provides a connection to three major collections. They include:
- The Classical Music Library, which covers Western art music from medieval to contemporary;
- Smithsonian Global Sound, a wide variety of ethnic world music; and
- African-American Song, offering spirituals to jazz to spoken-word narratives that all document the African-American experience.
The driving force behind UC Davis’ involvement in the online library is musicology professor Anna Maria Busse Berger. She, in fact, made the subscription one of her priorities after being chosen to chair the Department of Music this year.
As a result, the service, provided by Alexander Street Press, has become a collaboration of her department and the University Library.
“I was surprised to see that Davis was the only UC that didn’t subscribe to the service,” said Busse Berger.
“Listening to music is vital in studying so many different fields, other than just music. I just had to make sure that we, as a major educational institution, gave the opportunity to use this incredible tool.”
Complements department’s library
Of course, the music department has its own library in the Music Building — more than 10,000 classical, jazz and pop CDs — but that can only be accessed during the library’s 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. operating hours.
So, for the student who wants to listen to Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame from home, that can be difficult.
With the Alexander Street Press Service, anyone on an on-campus computer or any UC Davis affiliate who sets up an off-campus proxy needs only to access the service through University Library’s Web site, under the music subject guide.
For the Classical Music Library, the largest of the three libraries, a user can sift through the catalog by composer’s name, time period, instrument, performer or a myriad of other advanced search features.
Thanks to Anna Maria Busse Berger, chair of music, the entire campus has free access to a new Music Subscription Service at the University Library. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
A variety of recordings
And many pieces have more than one recording, so if the Royal Philharmonic’s recording of Dvorak’s New World Symphony seems a bit stolid, then the Vienna Symphony Orchestra or the Philarmonia Hungaria is just a click away.
“For anybody interested in music, it’s a great way to expand your knowledge and explore new artists,” said Busse Berger.
“You might be assigned to listen to a specific piece that’s in the library but listening to a few other pieces that the composer, or another composer, wrote at the same time gives better insight.”
And to that end, the music can also be sorted by date of composition.
Although music students would be the most obvious beneficiaries of this library, the importance of music and sounds truly reaches to all corners of the earthly experience.
Music interfused with culture
The African-American Song as well as the Smithsonian Global Sound libraries cover the breadth of sounds around the world and at home, and show how history, culture and music are interfused throughout time.
This is notably the case with the African-American library, which through music traces the black experience from enslavement to emancipation to the ongoing struggle for equality.
“Spirituals are important primary texts for examining black history through slavery,” says Lisa Materson, a professor in the Department of History and an expert on African-American history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“For many years, the church was the only independent black institution and, likewise, an important place for people to congregate and share artistry and experience.”
‘‘I just had to make sure that we, as a major educational institution, gave the opportunity to use this incredible tool.’
Anna Maria Busse Berger, chair of the Department of Music
Early jazz and ragtime
In addition to a wide collection of the black spirituals, there is also a wide collection of early jazz and ragtime music. Although these styles have been assimilated into all forms of mainstream culture, looking back at the earliest music provides a revealing glimpse at black culture.
“There has been a renewed interest among historians in studying black working-class culture in the 1920s and 1930s,” says Materson.
“Leisure, including the enjoyment of blues and jazz, was an important part of that culture. But there was also a lot of political resistance that came from jazz music — Billy Holliday’s ‘Strange Fruit,’ for example raised examples of the horrors of lynching in the South.”
Searching sounds by country
The Smithsonian Global Sound library, the second largest of the three services, lets users search through the sounds by region, country, language, cultural group, as well as the more traditional search options.
Because it covers the entire world of sound, the library overlaps a bit with the two other libraries.
However the Smithsonian library skews heavily toward countries outside of the Americas and Western Europe and is the only place to listen to a native Jamaican folk-song, an Ethiopian dance or an aria from a Chinese Opera.
Also, as an added benefit unique to this particular library, users who like what they hear can purchase a high-quality version of the track.
Music for everyone
“I see everyone — students, professors, faculty — at UC Davis using the services,” says Busse Berger.
“It doesn’t even have to be for studying, you can set up a list of pieces to listen to and have it playing in the background while doing other work.”
Materson plans on incorporating it into her curriculum in the near future and sees other professors following suit.
“What we are learning as we look at history, and the spread of cultures around the world, is that no true boundaries ever existed,” she says.
“There is always movement and an exchange of ideas back and forth, and that can most obviously be recognized through the music.”