I don’t have time to properly catalog them here at the moment, but a whole bunch of French opera scores from the University of Ottowa and University of Toronto have recently been added to the Internet Archive. There are a few famous ones, though many are rather obscure.
This link should take you to a listing of books in the IA’s collection with the subject of opera, listed in reverse chronological order.
Art Song Central will shortly begin accepting a limited number of advertisements, to defray the costs of maintaining and improving the site.
The link below is a pdf with the current rates for advertising:
Interested advertisers should contact David via the ASC contact form.
I’m sad to report that Art Song Central has been hacked. I’m not yet sure the extent of the damage, but I have removed the spam that was placed in the footer of each page.
I am taking the following rather extreme measures at the moment:
I have added a captcha system for registering or making comments. This ensures that a real person, not a robot, is registering for an account. I am also removing all subscribers from the userbase with a few exceptions. Users whose accounts have been deleted can create a new account, going through the captcha system.
I will be probably be changing the theme, and will unfortunately have to go through all of the other files with a fine tooth comb to find whatever backdoor may have been created.
UPDATE: I found 4 backdoors that were planted in the code, which have been removed. The wordpress code is up to date, and I’ve been through all the extra code as well, so I hope I have gotten it all. However I will be continuing to go through the code. There is a possibility that I will shut the site down for a brief period on Monday and do a clean install of all the software, just to be sure that I didn’t miss something. In any case, I will be keeping a close eye on the situation to see if any new attempts are made to hack the site.
I became involved relatively early in the digital public domain preservation movement, though many went far before me… One leader in the field is Michael Hart, who has been the driving force behind Project Gutenberg since it started in the 1970′s.
A man with many idiosyncrasies, Hart has frequently used some mental gymnastics to provide an assessment of the value he has put into the world. He mentions that in the 70′s he was given precious time on a computer, and calculated the cost of that time to be a hundred million dollars. He then set a goal of paying it back to the world by providing free etexts. If each download were worth a nominal $1, then he was able to create value many times that amount.
I’ve always enjoyed that calculation, even if it’s hard to justify the value of a download in such a way. Nevertheless, I am pleased at the growth of Art Song Central. Users now download more than 13 gigabytes of sheet music each month. If we were to set the nominal value of each song at $1, this site gives away more than $50,000 worth of music each month.
In contrast, the site brings in about $15 a month in donations and affiliate income. This is fortunately enough to pay for direct costs of hosting the site. (And I heartily thank all of you who have donated or used the affiliate links… especially the person who bought $300 worth of choral music through Sheet Music Plus this month!) I mention this because the purpose of the site has always been about creating value and expanding access, not making money.
However, there are costs to maintaining and improving the site, as well as a considerable time investment. I’m interested in seeking sponsorships, or possibly introducing some limited advertising on the site. It would be subtle, and only from people or organizations of which I approve. The income, if any, will go directly into improving the site so that even more value can be created for our ASC community. If you are interested in sponsoring or advertising on the site, please send me a message via the contact form!
David
I have finished transcribing (with the help of IPANow software) every song from the song index into IPA (except for English and Spanish, which IPANow does not handle.) I have saved a separate PDF file for the text and transcription of each song.
It will take some time to add links to each individual song post, so here are all the files currently available (as of 8/29/09), zipped by language.
Please note that with a few exceptions, these are unedited from the direct output of IPANow. The generally high quality of the transcriptions is a testament to this program, but there are bound to be mistakes, especially in the difficult and controversial world of French liason, or in words that don’t follow the “rules” of a language…
Please remember as you use these files that IPA cannot completely express the nuances of language. Use them as a basic guide, and make your own modifications as you see fit for more controversial elements (such as how to transcribe the final e in Italian.)
If you notice actual mistakes in a transcription, please leave a comment here, so it can be fixed. Thanks!
The stats haven’t jumped yet, and they usually double at the start of a college semester, but I expect most students will be back to school over the next two weeks. Classes have already commenced at JMU.
For those of you who look for new posts, there hasn’t been much to see lately, but there has been a fair amount of work being done in less visible ways.
Most importantly, I’ve developed a workflow to get IPA transcriptions up for all of the material over the next few months. Around January, I purchased an old Windows XP laptop for the sole purpose of running IPANow transcription software. (I live in a Mac/Linux household, but the IPANow software is only available for Windows.) The author had graciously provided a few files for some of the more popular songs, but if I wanted more, I was going to need to do it myself.
I’ve created transcriptions for all of the songs in French, and will be uploading them over the next several weeks. Italian will probably be next, and then German.
Please note that I am posting these as they come out of the transcription software, which means there will probably be occasional mistakes. It’s the only way I can face the daunting task of creating these files for the entire collection. However, I am counting on you as a community to point out any flaws in the comment section. (Please, though, don’t have flame wars over nitpicky stuff… IPA can’t express the nuances of any language, and we shouldn’t expect it to. These are primarily intended as broad guides for students unfamiliar with the language.)
Amazon has announced its new Kindle DX ebook reader with a larger screen size and I’m intrigued to see if it will be useful to view sheet music as it is generally presented on Art Song Central. Hypothetically, it ought to be small, but legible. (The screen is, after all approximately the size of an 8.5×11 sheet of paper folded in half.)
With the ability to view music in landscape format it also ought to be easy to convert some content to be useable that way. Margins could also be reduced, if it would be helpful.
If anyone is interested in being a guinea pig, I’d be eager to hear from you. Here’s a link:
I recently ran across a blog post by Elaine Fine in which she bemoans the scarcity of performances in her area that feature music written by women. I think this is probably not an uncommon scenario for most areas, despite an increasing number of women on conductor’s podiums or playing in orchestras. (Men are the distinct minority in some of the orchestras with which I’ve sung.)
While there are many factors that may contribute to this imbalance, some of which are historical and out of our control, it is to our advantage as singers to promote the work of quality composers, particularly when their work may have received less attention than it deserved because of their gender. (Or race, or any number of other extramusical considerations…) As such, I would like to make a bit more of an attempt to feature female composers on these pages.
Women already represented on ASC include Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862-1946) and Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867-1972), and I’ve just posted the first of several songs in my queue by Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944). I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to find a good PD source for songs by Amy Beach (1867-1944) soon, though there are already a couple early songs by her online at the Library of Congress website, from when she was still Amy Marcy Cheney. It would also be great to put some Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) here, but I suspect it will be hard to find public domain realizations of her songs. (There are some scores at WIMA, but the figured bass is unrealized.)
In her post, Fine mentions a number of other women composers who will soon hopefully find their way into this archive, including Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) and Clara Schumann (1819-1896). It is worth noting that Fine also has a significant body of work, and has made much of it freely available at the Werner Icking Music Archive.
Please do use the comments section here to add your thoughts. Do you have a favorite woman composer whose work may exist in a public domain edition?
It has been a general guiding principle since Art Song Central was founded that “singing translations” are to be avoided in most situations. This is in accordance with what I believe to be the overwhelmingly predominant aesthetic within the singing community today.
That was not the case in the early 20th century when many of the editions featured here were published. At the time, there was a strong sentiment that works should be performed in the language of the audience. Thus, many sources feature an English singing translation written in normal type below the notes, with the original text printed below it in italics, almost as an afterthought.
Increasingly, when this is the case, I have been stripping out the English words before publishing the song on ASC. My theory is that it avoids the distraction of a text that is simply not going to be used, and provides extra space to write in IPA or a word-by-word translation.
There are rare cases in which, at least in the United States, songs are still commonly sung in translation. This includes arias from some oratorios like Haydn’s Creation and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and a small number of songs. There are also some composers who set texts in a variety of languages, and I’m not always sure which language is the original. (This can be a problem with Tosti, in particular.) I will err on the side of inclusion if I think the singing translation may be desirable.
I’m interested in feedback on this. Is it worthwhile to take the time to strip out these translations? Will anybody miss them?
For a while, I’ve listed the full contents of Schirmer’s Anthology of Sacred Song series, edited by Max Spicker. However, I’ve been slow in creating individual song postings for most of this material, and there are a number of arias from these collections that I’d never post anyway.
To accelerate access to those anthologies here, I’ve posted a pdf file of each volume on the source page. That way users who locate a song through a site search will still be able to have immediate access to the sheet music.
I’ve done the same for some volumes I have scanned from other anthologies, including the Alto and Tenor volumes of Schirmer’s Operatic Anthology, also edited by Spicker, and volume one of the Reliquary of English Song, edited by Frank Hunter Parker. The latter, while not particularly scholarly, has been a popular source of beginner material for many voice teachers.
I am pleased to discover that Art Song Central now hosts or links to well over 100 volumes of music, all of which are at least marginally relevant to the student or professional singer. More are on their way. I encourage you to leave comments about collections you’d like to see added, or online resources that should be linked from ASC.
Folks keeping track of changes to the site will notice that little has been done since the summer. This is mostly due to an overwhelming schedule of teaching and performing this school year. Expect things to pick up again in June.
However, I did just upload a revised version of Nacht und Träume by Schubert, which had been posted in a version that lacked the last two measures. (An unwitting artifact of a previous correction.) This has been fixed and uploaded today.
I may also be adding more supporting materials for some songs that I’ve been creating for students, like spoken texts for foreign languages. (Though I’d prefer to have them done by native speakers… please feel free to volunteer!)
Thanks to the author of IPANow!, we will now be featuring IPA transcriptions of a number of song texts in our archive.
The first one, for Bist du bei mir, has already been posted.
From the software’s website:
IPANow! by PhoneticSoft is a powerful yet simple tool that automatically transcribes Latin, Italian, German and French texts into International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols by applying rules utilized by scholarly lyric diction textbooks. Simply type or paste in a text, and with the click of a button IPANow! produces an IPA transcription underneath each line of text that can then be exported in Rich Text Format (.rtf).
If you like this feature, please give the software a try!
A few people are experiencing strange problems downloading pdf files from this site. Most transfers are going normally, so I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on.
Anyone who is having download issues, please comment here and we’ll try and figure out the common theme…
So far, the only explanation I’ve had from the logs are situations where “hotlink” protection has prevented people from accessing the files: It is not an error when you are redirected from a PDF file that you bookmarked or clicked on a direct link from another site. It makes sure that people accessing the content are directed to the site itself and not just the file.
However, there seem to be other problems as well, including possible situations where the “referrer” information is not coming through properly. Any insight into this would be welcome.
Thanks,
David
I saw reports that this would happen, but it is nice to note that it has become reality: The IMSLP is back online.
This is great news, as they have a substantial amount of material online that would be of interest to users of Art Song Central.
Unfortunately, I found out about it because of a forum post by one of their contributors, asking how to take all of my scores here, remove the site specific text from the bottom and add them to their servers. For most of the files, that would be legal, but I think it’s clearly both rude and destructive to the ultimate goal of preserving and propagating public domain music. People who support similar goals should support each other’s efforts, not sabotage them.
They seem to have resolved their legal problems for the moment, and I hope it also indicates a change of attitude as they deal with the other sites that have been doing this for years. Sites like CPDL, WIMA and Mutopia, and even the fledgeling Art Song Central, deserve respect for their efforts. Wholesale copying of their content to bolster one’s own site is not in any way respectful, and damages the cause that we all serve. I was somewhat dismayed to see this done rampantly in the early growth of IMSLP.
On the other hand, linking to other sites’ content helps people know about the various archives that are available, and each serves a different niche. Linking to other material also helps codify what isn’t available online, and providing that other material is where people’s energies should be directed if they truly care about preserving and sharing this music.
Sorry to all who tried to access this site from about 10am on June 9 to about 3am on June 10. The server was down, and not in my control.
This is not the first time we’ve gone down, but it’s about the longest outage we’ve had. I’m not anticipating any more problems, but am laying the groundwork for a change in hosting if need be.
I just posted a PDF file of “Morgen” by Strauss, bringing the total number of song posts to 200.
It may seem silly, but for me 200 song posts was an important milestone to reach. Though the number of songs that can be downloaded for free via the site is already in the thousands, having the individual song posts makes them easier to browse and puts a lot of information right at the user’s fingertips.
Just wanted to take a moment to celebrate!
Apologies for the sluggish response of the server this morning. Not sure why this is happening, but our current hosting plan is on a shared server, which is all we can afford at the moment.
There were a lot of problems early on with this hosting situation, but they didn’t matter so much because there was so little traffic. Overall, it’s been pretty good over recent months. We’ll see if the sluggishness remains a problem.
I’m not sure how significant it is, but the vast majority of incoming traffic to Art Song Central comes from direct requests. Google search comes in second, but only accounts for about 2% of traffic, and maybe 10% of incoming requests.
I think that says two things about the success of Art Song Central. First, that it is principally built on word of mouth, and that once people have found the site, they bookmark it and use it again and again. Many of those direct requests are people visiting the site after having bookmarked it. Others are coming from people who have typed the url into their browser, or clicked a link in an email sent from a friend. So, keep spreading the word!
Secondly, it suggests that the more we as a community can raise the profile of this site, the better we’ll do at bringing people in through Google.
It’s not enough to just provide a great resource for people – they also have to know it’s there. If you like this site, please tell your friends about it! If you have a website of your own, link to us and help raise the profile of this site. Thanks!
Shame on me for not noticing, but the very first post was made here on May 8, 2007. Naturally, it took a while to get things up to speed, but I am belatedly wishing ASC a happy birthday!
And we’ve come a long way… Art Song Central now has over 500 visitors each day, who are downloading over 10,000 scores each month. With no advertising but word of mouth, the site has been growing in popularity by at least 20% each month. It also becomes more useful each month as I add material and increase the likelihood that users will find what they are looking for.
At the moment, there are individual posts for 168 songs, and I estimate that the site links to an additional 3000 songs and arias that are freely available for download, a significant number of which are part of the standard vocal repertoire. (There are other sites which host or link to many more songs, but contain mostly ephemera that has been justly forgotten, or is of purely historical interest.)
I’ve also begun to get a small trickle of money from affiliate links and a single donation, which has helped defray my hosting expenses for the last few months. I am hopeful that soon these links will allow ASC to operate in the black, and perhaps even fund accelerated growth of the site.
Finally, though ASC’s Google Page Rank is still rather low, we are showing up more and more often on the first page of hits for people searching for the titles of songs we host. You can help make this site more valuable to your friends by linking to us from your home pages, or networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Those links help Google “know” that this is a valuable site.
Thanks to all our visitors for making this a great first year!
