Contemporary World Music

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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 through speakers or headsets. 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 50,000 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, both in facsimile and as rekeyed, searchable text—an encyclopedia of their own within the database, 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 85,000 tracks. Both databases also work with The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online. A single search through Alexander Street’s Music Online interface brings back all results in any format from all three resources—tracks for listening, reference materials, liner notes, external Web links, biographical and bibliographic details, and related content. Imagine searching sitar and 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. 

CONTENT 

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, Navras Records, 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, as is the Passage to India Series from Navras.  With many rare, out-of-print, and hard to find items, even large libraries with major CD collections will discover much that is new in the database.

 HOW WILL YOU USE IT?

Music does more than entertain. It helps us connect on the feeling 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 will 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.

 PUBLICATION DETAILS

Contemporary World Music is available on the Web by annual subscription. The database will grow to 50,000 tracks at completion. The service works on Macs and PCs with a browser and requires no special software.  

Contemporary World Music is part of Alexander Street’s Music Online series, along with Classical Music Library, Smithsonian Global Sound, African American Song, and American Song for online listening and the reference databases Classical Music Reference Library, Classical Scores Library, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online, and African American Music Reference. Libraries may subscribe to one, some, or all of the collections and cross-search them through the unified Music Online interface.