Contemporary World Music

“Buffering is quick, and sound clarity is excellent. The database is well organized and easy to use. . . .

Highly recommended. All users.”—CHOICE

Through music we understand the history, customs, politics, personalities, celebrations, struggles, and joys of diverse peoples and cultures. Alexander Street’s Contemporary World Music delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent, for scholarship and pure enjoyment, online in streaming audio and via your iPhone or iPod Touch. Scholars and students will enjoy a rich and deeply indexed source for research in musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore, and performance studies.

Specially developed controlled vocabularies allow for searching and browsing by instrument, country, region, artist, genre, recording label, and other categories. Search, click, and listen to over 200,000 tracks of reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres. There is also traditional music—Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.

The albums’ original liner notes are included with an encyclopedia of their own within the collection—rich in music history, biographies, and production information.

Contemporary World Music complements Alexander Street’s Smithsonian Global Sound® for Libraries, together offering a cross-searchable source of more than 240,000 tracks upon completion. Alexander Street’s Music Online interface lets you cross-search all of the Alexander Street collections your library subscribes to—including the award-winning full-text reference, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online. A single search brings back all results in every format from all three resources—and all of your library’s Music Online content—including tracks for listening, reference materials, liner notes, external Web links, biographical and bibliographic details, and related content. Imagine searching sitar means seeing images of instruments and performers, listening to a concert, enjoying the album cover art and reading the notes, exploring additional reference information from Garland and other sources, and linking to related Web sites.

The recordings in Contemporary World Music come from renowned labels. The entire catalogs of Topic, Playasound, Budamusique, Air Mail Music, Manuiti, Crossing Records, Lyrichord World Music, and other recording companies are included. Ali Jihad Racy, Adama Dramé, Carlos Do Carmo, Parisa, Tran Quang Haï, Katrien Delavier, Hussein El Masry, Rassegna, Oedo Sukeroku Taiko, El Son Entero, Simon Shaneem, I Wayan Sadra, and Fawzy Al-Aiedy are just a few of the artists and ensembles contributing to the collection.

Many of the titles are encyclopedic in their breadth of coverage. For example, The Voice of the People from the Topic label, a 20-volume series of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditional music, is here in its entirety. With many rare and hard-to-find items, even large libraries with major CD collections will discover much that is new in the collection.

Music does more than entertain. It helps us connect on an emotional level with people and their conditions. The songs in Contemporary World Music address issues of racism, fair trade, and poverty, as expressed through the songs of Lassina Coulibaly of Burkina Faso; social injustice in the music of Henri Dikongue of Cameroon; and religious freedom, from Françoise Atlan & Moneim Oudwan (a Palestinian and Jewish duo).

Instructors of world history, geography, contemporary events, and other disciplines can use the music to expand teaching. Because the songs all reside at permanent URLs, the tracks can be incorporated into personal playlists and course folders and placed on digital course reserve. References to music will become a natural part of studies in almost all areas of the humanities.

Contemporary World Music is available online through annual subscription, works on both Macs and PCs, and requires no special software beyond a standard Web browser. Find out more about Alexander Street’s complete suite of Music Online listening and reference collections at http://alexanderstreet.com/products/music.