Sources of traditional music on the Web
(information about tune formats below)
- The Ceolas
Celtic Music Archive carries several hundred
traditional tunes, in various
formats, along with music software and an index of most published
tune sources and links to other sites with tunes and songs.
- Eric Foxley's Nottingham
Music Database (NMD) contains over 1000 traditional British related
folk dance tunes. All are stored using the Nottingham ASCII format
(see below). The collection arose from an original core forming the
repertoire of Freds Folks Ceilidh Band. The
database has excellent search facilities, and they can even generate
scores in gif or postscript form on-line (just takes a few seconds).
A translation of the database
into abc format exists, although not all
aspects of the original are maintained.
- The abc
Homepage keeps a list of links to many databases of songs,
especially those in abc format.
- John Chamber's abc
tune finder lets you search a vast index of tunes on the web and retrieve
them in a variety of formats, including traditional staff notation and midi, as
well as abc.
- The Digital
Tradition developed by Dick Greenhaus, and housed at the Mudcat Cafe,
is very large collection (over
5,000 songs) of (mostly) folk songs with words and music and midi files.
- The
Knotted Chord Folk Dance Band keeps a list of favorite tunessubmitted to the rec.folk-dancing news group by some of the
subscribers. Scans of sheet music for some of the tunes are provided.
- The best specific collections of MIDI music suitable for contradancing are:
- Contradancers of
Hawaii is building a collection of tunes for traditional contradances,
especially for dances usually danced to particular
tunes ("chestnuts" like Petronella, Chorus Jig, etc.).
(collections of tunes, above)
- abc
A simple and easy-to-read ASCII notation for tunes, developed by
Chris Walshaw. You can
include a tune in an e-mail message or usenet group posting, and your
audience can read it. Programs are available for
playing abc directly on a PC (even a primitive one), converting abc
to MIDI, and for producing typeset music from
abc. There are good abc tools for both Windows and Macintosh. Most of the tunes
in the Contradancers of Hawaii contra collection were originally entered
in abc format on a Macintosh and then converted to MIDI.
abc
Homepage
- Nottigham ASCII (NMD) format.
An ASCII format, somewhat more complex than abc, developed by
Eric
Foxley. The extensive
Nottingham Music Database of tunes is in this format. Programs are available to
typeset NMD files and to convert them to other formats.
NMD format information
Contradancers of Hawaii index of dances
Contradancers of Hawaii homepage