Cantus Verus: now a (virtual) ten foot shelf of books about music

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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I am a big user of the Internet Archive. And while I love it a great deal, I also find it to be annoying and frustrating. I sometimes feel like they are actively trying to hide the knowledge the are supposed to be spreading. It is almost as if half the entries were written by some AI programmed to write the quasi-English instructions on Vietnamese noodle packages.

Cantus Verus is really just me going through the scholarly music books at the internet archive (and Google Books, and Open Library, and elsewhere) and trying to make them easier to find. In addition to explicit, plain language descriptions of each book, each entry contains category assignments for the book ( e.g. music theory, music history, Singers and Singing, etc.). Many entries also contain links to author biographies or other interesting bits of information.

To guarantee that the text and images are true to the original publication, I am sticking solely to actual facsimile scans of published books instead of volunteer edited epub or html versions

The list is added to continuously but sporadically, so make sure to subscribe to the rss feed.

http://cantusverus.com
Last edited by herodotus on Mon May 16, 2016 6:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Cool!

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arkmabat wrote:Cool!
Thanks.

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My personal favorite is a truly hard to find book written by Colin McPhee about his time spent in Bali:

http://cantusverus.com/colin-mcphees-a-house-in-bali/
Last edited by herodotus on Mon May 16, 2016 6:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

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This is cool, thanks!

I hope others contribute to it, and it continues to grow.

Are you considering keeping this as a list of books (or other printed material), or were you considering including audio-based reference material, such as Britten's classic "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra"? (Yes, I know that's not "free" yet, and it's also geared toward...well, "young persons", but it was good enough for Paul McCartney to determine which instruments he wanted on songs for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, so.... :wink: I'm really just asking about that one since it's a popular example of audio-based "reference".)

I realize this list could mushroom quickly, and become extremely difficult to manage if you add audio and/or video reference material, but there is so much of it out there, and this is a great idea, that I wondered if you'd considered it.

Steve
Here's some of my stuff: https://soundcloud.com/shadowsoflife. If you hear something you like, I'm looking for collaborators.

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planetearth wrote:This is cool, thanks!
Thank you.
I hope others contribute to it, and it continues to grow.
It will continue to grow (in fact, it already has), but for now, I will be the sole editor.
Are you considering keeping this as a list of books (or other printed material), or were you considering including audio-based reference material, such as Britten's classic "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra"? (Yes, I know that's not "free" yet, and it's also geared toward...well, "young persons", but it was good enough for Paul McCartney to determine which instruments he wanted on songs for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, so.... :wink: I'm really just asking about that one since it's a popular example of audio-based "reference".)
For now I am concentrating on creating a sort of virtual reference library. There is so much unsourced, speculative, half-true to totally false stuff written about music on the web that I thought it wouldn't hurt to concentrate on the dryly informative stuff for a while. The Oxford history of Music, Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, that sort of thing.
I realize this list could mushroom quickly, and become extremely difficult to manage if you add audio and/or video reference material, but there is so much of it out there, and this is a great idea, that I wondered if you'd considered it.
To be honest, I would like to incorporate audio material at least. I have often thought that music history texts would be much better with audio musical examples rather than (or in addition to) notated examples. But one step at a time.

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That's great, thanks!

I've bookmarked the site, and will watch it grow....

Steve
Here's some of my stuff: https://soundcloud.com/shadowsoflife. If you hear something you like, I'm looking for collaborators.

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thanks a lot !!!

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This might be my favorite find to date. It's a bizarre mix of theory, performance practice, and folklore:

http://cantusverus.com/indian-music-by- ... e-rahamin/

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This looks great. I'll look forward to checking it out in detail soon.
Incomplete list of my gear: 1/8" audio input jack.

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Thank you so much! Indeed, archive.org is not going to win any usability award soon, so your effort is much appreciated!
Subscribed.

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Dostoyevsky wrote:Thank you so much! Indeed, archive.org is not going to win any usability award soon
There is a real problem with the whole enterprise with regard to texts. Computer people want an algorithm to do all of the work, while librarians insist on getting paid for their work. So there is all of this information hidden behind a really confusing interface, and no one wants to clean it up.
Subscribed.
Thanks.

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deastman wrote:This looks great. I'll look forward to checking it out in detail soon.
Great! I hope you get some use from it.

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Thank you!

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