Heitor Villa-Lobos Website

This site is designed and maintained by Dean Frey, Director of Red Deer Public Library, and runs on the Library's web-servers at http://www.villalobos.ca. When it was created in 1995, it had three aims:

• To celebrate and promote the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, the great master of Brazilian music, who expressed through his music the "soul" of his country: "Alma Brasileira."
• To market RDPL's CD Dance of the White Indian, produced as a fund-raising and promotional project in cooperation with the pianist Ricardo Peres.
• To provide for the Library real-life and real-time experience in website development and promotion, and global Internet marketing.

In the 14 years since then, we've done pretty well.  Ricardo's CD sold well - in fact, it sold out.  Unfortunately, there are no Peres CDs left here.  So we can cross that off the list.  Also since then, the website has become one of the top resources on the web for Villa-Lobos information.  In the past two years, we've had visits from 175 countries, with Brazil in second place, behind the U.S., and ahead of Canada and the U.K.

As far as the last goal is concerned, over the past years the Library has developed significant expertise in web publishing.  We manage the Library website - www.rdpl.org - a Digital repository called Digital Red Deer - www.digitalreddeer.ca - a Municipal Election forum - www.electionforum.ca - and a portal for Library programming for persons with developmental disabilities - www.artsparks.org.
 
With the move to the Drupal Open Source platform, we hope to make the Heitor Villa-Lobos website easier to navigate, as well as more interactive.  Watch for major changes in the following months!

November 14, 2007: Check out this new article on Navigating the Villa-Sphere.  

Dean Frey
Director
Red Deer Public Library
January 1, 2009