Before I start posting material, let me introduce some of my favorite similar sites:
The Werner Icking Music Archive is one of the best and most substantial. It is one of the closest in spirit to a Project Gutenberg for music. (Project Gutenberg is also beginning to have some music, though it is not yet very substantial.)
A similar, well stocked archive, but mostly aimed at choral singers, is the Choral Public Domain Library. It has over 8500 scores in the collection as I write. However, only a few of them are for solo voice.
More similar to what I’m trying to acheive with this site is Parlorsongs.com, which has a great collection of parlor songs transcribed into Sibelius Scorch files, along with well researched commentary on each one. Many songs in their collection are freely printable, though their files aren’t intended to be downloaded or shared. Very well done site.
The Mutopia Project also has some good material, but is somewhat limited in scope by requiring all content to be encoded in Lilypond.
The Library of Congress hosts several collections of scanned sheet music. However, while the collections are substantial, the content is mostly ephemeral and is geared toward the historian, not the singer.
Finally, the Variations Prototype at Indiana University has a great collection of standard singer’s repertoire, but the resolution is too low to be printed. (Most scores are legible when viewed on the computer, but some are even too lo-res for that.) The same project also has a nice collection of opera scores.
Do keep in mind that Project Gutenberg does have a decent number of books on music and singing which remain relevant today, and the collection continues to grow. Anyone wishing to help further the cause is encouraged to join Distributed Proofreaders, which is now Project Gutenberg’s main source of books.
In the interest of providing a unified location to find resources in the above archives, I will endeavor to post listings of the most useful materials from each.
