David Kraus: Good Links

: Making Connections
: Organizations & Groups
Vermont Arts Council: The VAC is the government supported Arts organization for the state of Vermont. Direct access to my VAC site page can be found here.
Vermont Composers Consortium: Vermont's biggest organization for professional music composers. With over nine hundred Vermont artists and many more from around the world, there's alot of good music to be found here in any genre. There is also recorded interviews from the New Music radio show Kalvos and Damien.
Vermont All State Music Festival: Through a stringent statewide competitive audition process, the cream of Vermont's highschool musicians get to perform in a series of concerts in a variety of musical consortiums with some of our country's finest conductors.
CD Baby: CD Baby is the largest on-line record store in the world today for independent artists, an incredible company who treat musicians fairly and honestly.

: Education & Information
Music Panculturalism ~ An NPR Video Special: The Composer/Musicologist Tom Manoff has been NPR's music critic and commentator since 1985. Join him in a live video/audio interview at the NPR studios and hear his absorbing insights into this emerging 21st century music culture, with lots of musical examples played.
TomManoff.com: Tom Manoff is a noted composer, NPR's music critic, and the guy who's becoming the interpreter of sorts for the the music of the 21st century.
The American Council of Learned Societies: ACLS is a private nonprofit federation of seventy national scholarly organizations, and is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.
"Ghosts Among Us: What's Past is Prologue": This ACLS essay on pancultural learning is excellent. Terry Moreland Henderson is an LA school teacher who has developed a program using poetry and storytelling to help students from every cultural background research their cultural origins and express through their creative writing where they came from and who they are. Her dilineation between the concepts of "multiculturalism" and "panculturalism" are the best I've read. Moving beyond our self-imposed cultural boundaries is where creative art is taking us today. Reading her essay and watching the NPR video above is enlightening, and helps clarify why we need to transcend cultural politics and what panculturalism really means in this context. There are a wealth of positive ideas and new insights to be gained, well worth the energy and time for anyone seriously looking to break the limits of our present world view.
(OK, I admit it...I'm really into this:)
North Indian Classical Music: This is a great site to learn about Indian music. It's well organized and easy to follow having been put together by a master student of Ravi Shankar.
The Governor's Institues of Vermont: Enriching the lives of motivated Vermont highschool students through
intensive educational experiences on college campuses.
Changing Classical Guitar Strings: An excellent site that teaches through concise explanation and photos how to change strings correctly, and includes valueable info for understanding the guitar's perculiar tuning idiosyncrasies that are inevitable in its design.
Changing Acoustic Steel Strings: A really good site explaining how to put new strings on a steel-string acoustic guitar; includes big photos for clarity.
Medical Problems of Performing Artists: The first clinical medical journal devoted to the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of medical and psychological disorders of performing artists.

: Musicians - Artists - Businesses
Charles Eller Studios: One of New England's most respected and unique recording studios, my band's first CD "Some Sort of Angel" was produced here. You have to see and hear this studio to believe it.
ERGO Communications: Peter Bruce Wilder has won five Emmy's for his recording, engineering, music composition and performing, and full production work for PBS, Disney, film scoring, and more. it's about the music. I am very pleased he will be producing my new solo guitar CD.
Otter Creek Music Productions: Otter Creek Music offers full service multitrack recording services for Independent Musicians. Located in Florence, Vermont, producer/musician Bob DeMarco has the ears and chops for all your audio needs.
Cliff House Audio: Cliff House Audio has a fantastic sounding room which makes for an intimate and relaxing recording environment. And award winning producer Jody Petersen makes it all happen.
Wind that Shakes the Barley: From the mountains of Vermont, Wind that Shakes the Barley presents a tantalizing mixture of traditional music and folklore from the Celtic lands of Ireland, Scotland, Brittany and beyond.
The Vermont Jazz Ensemble: The VJE, Vermont's premier 17 piece big band founded by well known saxaphonist Rich Dividian, are a wonderful group of experienced professionals playing the incredible sounds of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and many of our finest contemporary jazz composers. It was a musical and personal pleasure to have performed and recorded for two years with this fine orchestra.
Buch Spieler: The best independent (not a chain...) CD store in Central Vermont. Support'em.
Guitar Sam: A fine quality music store dealing in instrument and equipment sales, services and repairs for all instruments, and an extended list of private music instructors.
Vermont Music Library and Shop: The VLMS is a music library and store dedicated to cataloging and preserving the music of Vermont.
: "You must understand the whole of life, not just one
little part of it. That is why you must read, that
is why you must look at the skies, that is why
you must sing and dance, and write poems
and suffer and understand,
for all that is life."

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti