Today's recommending listening includes jazz musician Charles Mingus, Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic, James Brown: Live! and Broadway classics. Happy listening!
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 or Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.
Read About Music
UCLA Music Library has a large list of freely available online music resources including popular, jazz and classical sheet music.
Streaming Music
What Hi-Fi? has a list of 20 virtual concerts that was updated very recently, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Neil Young and Radiohead are among those on the list!
LA Opera has a really fun opera for families called The Prospector. It’s their celebration of Puccini's "The Girl of the Golden West” and is available on YouTube.
Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Online Book Club Invitation
Sign up for our free Online Book Club launching on Monday, April 27th, 2020. The book club will read one book every two to three months, so you'll have plenty of time for each book. Download an eBook of each reading selection with your library card. This is an opportunity for the Glendale Library, Arts & Culture community to read interesting books and discuss them in an online community. The first book club title is The Burglar by bestselling author Thomas Perry. Future books will include topics related to lifelong learning, social issues, literature, psychology, and other user-submitted ideas.
Art Online
The Library of Congress has art and music! Try browsing the Lomax collection photographs including 400 snapshot photographs made during sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and 1950 for the Archive of American Folk-Song. Listen to some of the music from the Archive including: Cowboy songs, ballads, and cattle calls from Texas, American fiddle tunes, Folk-Songs of America and more.
Studio Ghibli, the award-winning Japanese animation house, is offering free wallpapers for video call backgrounds featuring scenes from their animated films Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Spirited Away.
Streaming Art
Check out 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki in full on NHK’s website or mobile app now for free, available through May 26. This is an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at legendary Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli. For a decade, he allowed a single documentary filmmaker to shadow him resulting in this 4 part series: Ep. 1 Ponyo is Here, Ep. 2 Drawing What's Real, Ep. 3 Go Ahead - Threaten Me and Ep. 4 No Cheap Excuses.
Art Inspiration - Try It at Home
So we made a journal or two, how about starting to fill them up?
You can make your journal a detailed description of something new you encountered, complete with drawings and notes. It can be a place to write your thoughts about what you're seeing, hearing and smelling. It can be a journal you keep specific to something you frequently do, or one you keep to connect with and better remember an old place.
John Muir Laws offers a one hour free workshop every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM (PT) for journaling tips, techniques, inspiration, teaching strategies, and interviews. The meeting format starts with a tutorial, demonstration, or interview and then opens to a question and answer session.
You can download a free PDF copy of his book How to Teach Nature Journaling and his nature journaling curriculum, Opening the World Through Nature Journaling. Follow along with extensive videos on his YouTube channel.
Not sure how to start, try just writing first. Be creative with your words, try out:
Simile/ Analogy (it looks like ----- to me)
Metaphor (I am a rock; Be water my friend)
Alliteration (busy beautiful bee)
Word shapes (form an object or pattern with letters or words)
Onomatopoeia (Bang, Pow, Bam, Woosh!)
Another great resource is the weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. The blog is nicely indexed so you can delve into different topics that are well researched.
You'll find practical studio tips, and you can take a virtual tour through his sketchbooks.
He offers a YouTube channel full of insights into drawing and painting. There are practical tips and techniques in describing things that are here, were here and are from the imagination.
Let us know how you did on all our try it at home projects with #brandfromhome
Staff e-Recommendations
Art and Craft is a fascinating documentary film highlighting the life and work of the prolific art forger, Mark Landis. It all starts like you’ve entered midway through a storyline and the viewer rushes to situate themselves. Then, you are given some context with an interview-style format. In short, this documentary explores how Landis successfully duped many museums across the United States for the last 30 years. It was not until the former Oklahoma museum registrar, Matthew Leininger, began to connect the dots. He revealed the wizard behind the curtain and made a career in taking down Landis. Aaron Cowan, the Director of DAAP Galleries at the University of Cincinnati, arranges an exhibition of Landis’ "artwork." Cowan questions Landis’ true intentions, is he a performance artist or is he truly trying to fool major institutions. In a documentary based on deception, this film is transformed into a human interest story. It addresses Landis’ mental health and the viewer gains empathy and understanding for his actions. I am not condoning art forgery but, instead, realizing how the general public dismisses the mentally ill. For Landis, it was a nicer world to play a part, than live in reality. -AD
Situations are not as they appear in my recommended Hoopla double feature of the cheeky Art and Craft and Gambit. The subject of Art and Craft, Mark Landis, is a philanthropist who gifts over 100 works of art to dozens of museums across the U.S. In Gambit, thief Harry Dean (Michael Caine) and art connoisseur Emile Fournier (John Abbott) need Nicole Chang (Shirley MacLaine) to be their (totally?) silent partner to pull off the heist of a statuette owned by a wealthy collector. Difficulties emerge when we find out Landis is actually forging works of art using his "memory trick" while watching classic films (like Gambit!) on his bedroom television. And is Harry Dean's heist really a "heist" at all? Although I can't reveal exactly what's going on, I can say that nothing is technically illegal, everything's a performance, and everyone will surprise you! -SB
Alfred Brendel Plays Beethoven Piano Sonatas Volume 1. December 17, 2020 will mark Beethoven's 250th birthday. There are many wonderful recordings of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas. I love Alfred Brendel's recordings from the 1990s with his sensitivity, legato and warmth. Brendel is a great place to start when exploring the sonatas. I am including the link to the first volume but all 32 sonatas recorded by Brendel are including in Music Online (Alexander Street). Liner notes are included with these recordings! -BW
Covid-19 Resources
Reliable information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) is available from the World Health Organization, the California Department of Public Health and Los Angeles County Public Health Department and City of Glendale.
Resources for Music Businesses And Industry Workers, Playing for Change, Sounding Point LA