This post republishes a review of the Metropolitan Opera’s “Met History” webpages that I wrote in 1998 for the HomeworkCentral.com Top 8 Newsletter. From 1997-2001, every week I reviewed five, and in later years eight, of the learning materials flooding into the internet. Most of those early nuggets of gold in the internet swamp remain online — often enhanced with new technology like the music delivery you will get by clicking the above image. Extensive database materials and a photo archive are now available. My 1998 review follows:

The majestic history of structures, seasons, and singers of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera fills these pages of the Met’s Website. Students of music history and biography will find this a unique resource. From the time it was founded in 1884, the Metropolitan has played a major artistic role New York and throughout the opera world. Contemporary photographs of the great singers in costume grace the pages of text describing specific performance, taking us back through the years to relish great music, grandly given. As Algernon St. John-Brennon wrote in 1915 in the New York Telegram: “The loveliness, the allurement, the seductiveness, the reverie, and the dream were in the glorious utterance of the singer. We cannot ask for more.”

A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold. Line segments represent mappings from the notes of one chord to those of another. Composers in a wide range of styles have exploited the non-Euclidean geometry of these spaces, typically by using short line segments between structurally similar chords. Such line segments exist only when chords are nearly symmetrical under translation, reflection, or permutation. Paradigmatically consonant and dissonant chords possess different near-symmetries and suggest different musical uses.

The article is by Dmitri Tymoczko who illustrates ChordGeometries on animations with sounds on his Web pages at Princeton University. He invites you to: “Watch as Chopin moves around in a circle, a Mobius strip, and in four-dimensional space! Or try Deep Purple on a Mobius strip!”

For some background to the topic, an introduction to Form in Music by Catherine Schmidt-Jones is available in Rice University’s Connexions. Anthony Brandt, also in Connexions, gives an overview of Musical Form, with examples from Schumann, Bach, Boulez, and Beethoven.

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Here as this learn node begins are links to two of the many superb music modules on Connexions by Catherine Schmidt-Jones:
One is about Ragtime.
The other is about the great Ragtime artist Scott Joplin.

Scott Joplin and Ragtime are booming at The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation, where the biography page about Scott Joplin includes the piano-player illustration shown here. Moving on through this virtual Ragtime online network, an invitation to the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival (every June) takes us to Sedalia, Missouri.
On a visit to Sedalia’s Web site for a look at its music history, it is easy to get sidetracked into its rich railroad history, as this Katy engine image from the Sedalia site recalls. It seems certain Scott Joplin often passed through the now restored Katy Depot — and perhaps there was a piano in the waiting room where ragtime was played in his hey day.

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Making music as well as learning about it can be assisted from online. YourAccompanist.com offers, for example, Melodic Minor Scales which can be used as accompaniment for practicing singing scales. Musicians of every sort are to be found in many contexts and formats, and nurtured online by individuals and organizations both large and small. A fine node that is an Introduction to G.F. Handel is found on the Portland Handel Society Newbies page.

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