August 11. 2006
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                                                               Courtesy NASANot strictly music, but have a look at this astonishing short film from NASA.  It's an animation of photos taken by the Huygens space probe as it descended to the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter last year -- and has one of the most accidentally beautiful soundtracks in the solar system.

Other flotsam and jetsam off the net: West coast inventor Ryuichi "Richie" Iwamura has a little melody search engine online for the memory-challenged -- you tap out a melody on an on-screen keyboard, and it identifies it for you .... young composers can "communicate, share, and collaborate with other musicians" at (where else?) the Young Composers Forum   .... dozens of rare and beautiful early scores are now online at Harvard's Loeb Music Library  -- check out the 1794 adaptation of Mozart's Symphony in E flat Major, K. 543, with its list of subscribers who made (or, toward the end of Mozart's life, often failed to make) new compositions possible .... and the University of California, Santa Barbara has put a bunch of its collection of 6,000 early cylinder recordings online.  Plenty of treasures here, from early string quartet recordings to William Jennings Bryan lecturing on immortality and E.H. Shackleton explaining his south polar expedition.

Personally, I'm partial to the spirituals.