Brand from Home | January 7, 2021

Brand Library&Art Center
Jan 7, 2021
5 min read

Music Playlists

Listen to a streaming playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library, Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Music Online from Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.

Get a free Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Library eCard instantaneously. It can be used to access online resources including eBooks, eAudiobooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines, online classes, online tutoring, and learning games, as well as streaming movies and music, and more.

Today's recommending listening is virtuoso recorder concertos, Taylor Swift, Pink Floyd, and blues guitarist Tampa Red.

Learn About Music

Classics Explained was launched in August 2020 on YouTube. There are currently twelve episodes and they are animated, accessible and fun. Works by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Debussy and more are included.

January 1, 2021 was Public Domain Day and we often get questions relating to public domain music. For more information see the web site of the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Some of the public domain music sources we often refer patrons to are IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library, the Public Domain Information Project and the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive.

Read About Music

The Proquest Music Periodicals Database includes full text of over 140 music magazines and indexing to many more. Do you need articles from Guitar Player, Jazz Times, Keyboard, Fanfare or The Musical Times? Login with your library card.

Music for Meditation

Are you interested in trying meditation? Here are some streaming recordings that might help you practice. Login with your library card number.

Art and Music

David Li, the talented animator behind the stretchy elastic Morty head and the interactive choir of singing lips, partnered with Google Arts & Culture to create a very festive interactive animated Blob Opera. Virtually pull up on one of four different blobs that sing at different pitches depending on how high they are pulled. The red blob is a soprano, the green is a mezzo-soprano, the blue is a tenor, and the purple is a beautiful bass. The blobs can be pulled in any order to create a song. Record your creation and share it with family & friends.

In the animation Catgot, bubbles explode into kaleidoscopic droplets, and beads of water bounce across the screen. Created by Hong Kong-based animator and illustrator Ho Tsz Wing, inspired in part by artists Masanobu Hiraoka and Matt Abbiss the work is set to an electronic track by ISAN and gracefully follows a series of fluid, synchronized movements. Downbeats correspond with abstract shapes that flow from one scene to the next in a psychedelic fashion.

Dance

San Francisco-based Post:Ballet and the Berkeley Ballet Theater teamed up to perform Waltz of the Snowflakes. Artistic director Robert Dekkers embraces limitations with creativity. This contemporary ballet take on the traditional snow scene is performed all in white—down to the masks, sneakers and even the clouds in the sky above the empty parking lot at the historic Alameda Naval Air Station where it was filmed. With cinematography and editing by Ben Tarquin, this short film captures a generous feeling of freedom in a year full of restrictions.

Learn About Art

Artstor Digital Library is a superb database of over 2.5 million high-quality art images from approximately 300 different collections including the American Museum of Natural History, Graphic Design Collection (The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art), the Historic American Sheet Music Covers (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) and The Ringling Circus Museum (Florida State University). Artstor provides easy access to these images which are ready to download with their rights-cleared for use in education and research, making them perfect for use in classroom instruction and handouts, presentations, student assignments, and other noncommercial educational and scholarly activities.

Oxford Art Online is a great resource to use for reference information on art and artists, including peer-reviewed articles and scholarly encyclopedic entries. Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today.

Brand Library Staff Reviews

Dr. Seuss Goes To Wa r by Richard H. Minear and Dr. Seuss. I like to consider myself a big fan of Dr. Seuss. I have anecdotes, I knew his real name, I know about QUICK HENRY THE FLIT, I visited his home in La Jolla (he lived like the Grinch!) but his career cartooning during the WWII I had actively avoided, knowing by reputation that it was a stain on his career. Seeing his unique and very specific drawing style used to draw offensively racial caricatures and political cartoons that lean towards propaganda was a visceral experience for me. But Dr. Seuss Goes to War, a book chronicling this time in his career, does a great job of laying out who Ted Geisel was in this era, and how the mentality of the country as a whole made a young artist feel like creating these illustrations was part of a large patriotic effort to support national pride. It also helped going into this to know how remorseful and apologetic Geisel was about this era of his work. But in many instances, Geisel takes smart jabs at the Fuhrer, fascism, racism, Lindbergh, Roosevelt, isolationism, and nationalism. This book is part biography, part history lesson and part art criticism, but it’s full of Dr. Seuss drawings to help not weigh it down. -GG

Shemekia Copeland Never Going Back (2009). When discussing the future of the blues, I always bring up two fabulous young artists Shemekia Copeland and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. The amazing 21 year old Kingfish I will discuss in a later issue but Shemekia is another artist you must hear if you need to get up to speed on contemporary blues. She is the daughter of blues legend Johnny Copeland. Her first album was released in 1998 when she was a teenager. Never Going Back is one of two albums she recorded for Telarc (her earlier and later albums are on Alligator Records). She has a very solid backing band but the emphasis is always on her powerful and soulful voice. The album is polished and also focuses on clarity of the words. If I had to name favorite tracks I’d say Dirty Water, Never Going Back to Memphis, Limousine, Percy Mayfield’s River’s Invitation and her fantastic rendition of Joni Mitchell’s Black Crow. Her intimate version of Johnny Copeland’s Circumstances is wonderful with just voice and two acoustic guitars, one playing slide. The blues have a bright future in the hands of artists like Shemekia. A PDF of the booklet is included. -BW