American Music Center, and: Counterstream Radio, and: Newmusicbox (review)

The American Music Center (AMC) was founded in 1939 by six American composers: Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, Otto Luening, Quincy Porter, Marion Bauer, and Harrison Kerr. In its role as an advocate for new American music, its Web magazine and online radio station provide a variety of ways to hear, study, and experience American music. Membership is open to composers, performers, ensembles, and institutions. AMC is a member of the Inter national Association of Music Information Centers (IAMIC). Each IAMIC center promotes the music of its own country, providing such information as biographies, selective sound tracks, and representative pages from scores.

Members may list their works in the AMC Online Library, apply for various competitions and grants, attend workshops, access the online Contemporary Music Ensembles Directory, request scores and research, and receive AMC publications. Membership fees (not required for searching and browsing) vary by category: individual $55, student/ senior $35, international $65, international student/senior $45, organization $85 to $135.

Navigation on the AMC Web site is easy. A toolbar at the top of each page provides access to the main areas: Home; About; Explore; Resources; Membership; Grants; Donate; Contact. In addition, each AMC page displays links to "Explore American Music" and to Counterstream Radio. "Ex plore American Music" divides its listings into three categories: find artist, find repertoire, and find event. Subheadings listed on the right allow the user to go directly to almost any page on the site. A few subheadings have multiple access points, e.g. Explore and Resources both provide access to the AMC Online Library.

Some subheadings are not self-explanatory. Newmusicbox Covers are "zine" interviews (multi-media conversations with composers, performers, and new music industry insiders) offering both online videos and transcripts on the newmusicbox.org Web site. Music for Young Audiences is an online guide for educational programming. Users can select from a list of composers' names, check a performing medium, fill in a title box, select a topic (e.g., bears, blues, bonbons), specify a grade, and fill in a range of durations. Users can also specify which Boolean operator to use, and specify sort criteria and the number of hits displayed per page.

The two online catalogs provide some similar access points but different displays of results. The AMC Online Library is a collection of electronic versions (score and audio), which one can search by title, composer (first and/or last name), date, duration (a feature helpful to broadcasters), keyword, entry type (audio/score), ensemble type, and instrumentation. The ability to combine fields enables one to find, for example, all works dated between 1950 and 2000 that are between ten and fifty minutes in duration and include both violin and percussion (thirteen in number). Working with large sets of results can be cumbersome, as one most move through them page by page, but sets that are genuinely too large can be refined by adding another limiter. While not perfect, this is a remarkably detailed set of data, and one wishes more systems indexed duration and instrumentation in this way. Most of the audio is in MP3 format and opens in a separate player window. Scores are in PDF. Some of the audio and scores are complete, but excerpts are more common. Some titles include links to purchase, rent, or peruse the score as well as to the composer's home page.

The AMC 20th Century Scores Collec tion, housed at the New York Public Li brary for the Performing Arts, contains over 60,000 scores by American composers, both self-published and published works, some of which cannot be found anywhere else. One can search this unique catalog by composers' first and/or last name and by instrumentation/ensemble type. Most headings are clickable to reveal additional limits, e.g., clicking on "Solo instrument with...