For your convenience - electronic piano keyboard!

Did you know there's an electronic keyboard in the Music & Media Center? Did you also know that you can use it to compose out your own compositions? to record audio files to incorporate into media projects? to easily create tidy musical examples for your research papers? to transpose your part to a different range, key, or even instrument? You can do all of this and more!

To make this work, our audio-video tech BJ Blue hooked up our Yamaha piano keyboard to a computer that already had the musical annotation program MuseScore on it. He also downloaded another program that allows you to record direct from the piano keyboard to audio file. It's super cool and waiting for you.

Music Competition & Career Guide

Figuring out what to do over the summer or knowing how to get your career started in the music world can be, at best, daunting. There are thousands of competitions but frankly, searching the internet for music competitions isn't the most efficient way to spend your time. And so far as a career in music, there are a lot of hidden angles and details that you probably want to know about. We just finished creating a new Music Competition and Career Guide full of resources that will make your life just a little bit easier if you're looking for a summer competition or getting ready to graduate and start a new career.

The Competition tab offers a variety of resources to check out. The one website included here is Bakitone. This site offers a fantastic database of competitions around the world that you can easily search by instrument or location. You'll also find three books here that provide detailed information about different competitions. Finally, don't forget to read the trade magazines! Although life seems a little busy it's always worth taking the time to peruse the major trade magazine for your instrument of choice. Not only do they provide announcements about upcoming competitions and workshops, but they also provide detailed reviews of past competitions and the people that won them - a fantastically easy way to find out what makes a winning performance.

The Careers tab identifies several books providing career guidance, resources for those of you looking to continue on in higher education, and a couple writing guides for anyone interested in writing reviews and program notes. The career guidance books are as wide ranging as telling you what careers are available in the music industry and what they involve to detailed information about licensing and publisher agreements.

At the moment the guide is a bit book-laden but you can change that! There's an option on the guide's homepage to submit your links to additional online competition and career resources. Submit your links and I'll add them to the guide for the benefit of current and future students.

Tulane University Digital Library

This month we're spotlighting the Tulane University Digital Library, aka TUDL. Here you can find a tremendous wealth of archival materials that have been photographed, digitized, and made available for viewing online. As you can see from the image on the right, you'll find materials from Amistad Research Center, the Hogan Jazz Archive, Howard-Tilton, Louisiana Research Collection, Matas Health Sciences Library, the Latin American Library, University Archives, and even WTUL! That's a lot of stuff.

WTUL's Vox Humana, for example, is serial publication that includes reviews of WTUL shows, new recording releases, interviews with local musicians, and more. All in all a fantastic resource for studies in local music. All in all a fantastic source for information about local music from the 80's, 90's and now.

The Sheet Music Collection, which includes hundreds of digitized pieces of music, is just a sampling of the thousands of pieces of music you'll find in the Hogan Jazz Archive.





The Library Speaker Series collection includes the archived video from the Music From the Library Speaker Series. The only place to find it. 


In short, TUDL is a fantastic place to find archival resources for Louisiana research. Remember! Much of what you see in TUDL is just a representative sampling of much larger physical collections. So while you might an aweful lot in TUDL, you may also want to check out the repositories as well to see what other treasures you can find.