Music Playlists
Today's recommending listening includes folk musicians Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton, highlights from Wattstax, Grammy award-winners Flaco Jiménez and Max Baca, and Vivaldi's clarinet concertos.
Get a free Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Library eCard instantaneously. It can be used to access our online resources including eBooks, eAudiobooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines, online classes, online tutoring, and learning games, as well as streaming movies and music, and more.Try listening to a streaming Playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library, Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.
Learn About Music
Popular children’s musical artist Laurie Berkner has quite a few education videos on her YouTube channel for the whole family.
Read Music
Performing Arts in America 1875-1923 (New York Public Library) is a searchable database of archival material held by the Performing Arts Library. It includes JPEG images of sheet music, show tunes, popular music, jazz, and dance music.
Streaming Music
NY Phil Plays On is a portal with hours of New York Philharmonic digital content, including performance footage from the past and present.
Art Online
Gagosian Gallery curates classic and contemporary video art every two weeks. Broadcast: Alternate Meanings in Film and Video is live through June 22. Looking to the late 1960s - marked by deep uncertainty, social unrest, and radical transformation - the online exhibition includes Rachel Feinstein, Piero Golia, Romuald Hazoumè, Carsten Höller, Nam June Paik, and Ed Ruscha.
Flower Dance (ផ្ការាំ) is a Cambodian folk song about the movement of flowers floating in a lake with vocals by composer, singer, and musician Yorn Young. The music video, crafted with young viewers in mind, was created by Andrew Benincasa, mixing his visual style with Cambodia’s history of shadow puppetry.
Learn About Art
The Exploratorium offers tinkering studio experiments with science, art, technology, and delightful ideas. Try their free online class Tinkering Fundamentals: Motion and Mechanisms and their blog for a behind the scenes look.
Art Inspiration - Try It at Home
Automata or cam toys use hand-powered mechanisms to create cyclical motions that animate a scene. Students design and create cam toy machines with moving objects/characters that symbolize abstract concepts and represent dynamic situations.
Get inspired by artist Federico Tobon who created hand-cranked miniature automatons out of popsicle sticks and paper. "The A-HA moment from these projects was when I discovered that using paper gives these machines a very organic feel. Some of them would look very stiff and mechanical otherwise. Paper is also very easy to work with and you can make many versions and experiment freely. Paper is versatile, it can be made to function as a structural element, or spring, or washer, or decoration."
Watch a short compilation of all 29 of the series.
Learn more from Rob Ives about mechanisms, tools and techniques. More diagrams and explanation of how mechanisms work from technologystudent.com.
The Exploratorium has two instruction sheets for making your own cardboard model automata. Or try these inspired instructions from the Crafts Council UK.
Karakuri : how to make mechanical paper models that move by Keisuke Saka is an introduction to the simple mechanisms, such as gears, cranks, cams, and levers, used to bring to life these amazing moving paper models or automata. Detailed explanations, accompanied by diagrams, explain the physics behind how karakuri move and operate.
Staff e-Recommendations
In 2007, artist and professor El Anatsui was part of the Venice Biennale, a visual arts exhibition. In the mesmerizing hour-long documentary Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui we see him overseeing the installation of two large sculptural pieces. One covers most of one side of an old building, the other runs floor to ceiling in a gallery space. They look like they could be made of cloth—they fold and twist creating shadows as they cascade downward draping like curtains—but are actually metal. The documentary progresses, and we see Anatsui returning home to Nigeria where the documentary begins to dig into his creative processes, artistic philosophy and personal life. As it turns out, Anatsui advises his students to think economically and expansively; if your media is inexpensive or found (he himself has worked with clay, wood and aluminum bottle caps), the artist has the ability to express themselves in whatever dimensions, breaking geographical boundaries and freely flowing in every direction. El Anatsui seems reserved and private throughout the documentary, but his work, a cross between painting and sculpture in bottle caps, is anything but! -SB
John Williams - Virtuoso Variations for Guitar. This fantastic album by Australian classical guitarist John Williams (not to be confused with Star Wars composer John Williams) was released in 1972. Williams has had a very long and successful career and with many albums that have had a huge influence on the guitar community. This album includes pieces that are standards in the virtuoso guitarists repertoire such as Giuliani’s Variations On A Theme by Handel and Sor’s Variations on A Theme by Mozart. The album opens with an exciting and intimate guitar arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne which was originally written for solo violin. I’d recommend listening to recordings of the Chaconne on both instruments. There are many great classical guitarists in the world today and I’m sure this album had an influence on many of them. -BW
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