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!
Thanks to Google Books, I’ve been able to continue to index a lot of material without having to scan it myself. I’ve added about 6 more volumes in the last few days, for a total number of source volumes on the site exceeding 50. (Including at least 2000 songs)
As resources are available, I will begin seeking out more high quality sources to scan, and focusing more on the repertoire most needed. (Noting that several volumes are now available from Google that I had laboriously scanned myself!)
I’ve been hard at work the past two weeks, primarily adding and indexing sources that are currently available via Google Books and the Internet Archive. I haven’t made an exact count, but it’s clear that there are now well over 1000 more songs which are searchable on this site, and immediately downloadable thanks to the above mentioned sources.
I’ve had some specific requests for Schubert songs, and will try to scan some favorites from a public domain volume I can access at the library in the coming weeks.
If you’d like to see this progress more quickly, please give a donation via the paypal link in the sidebar!
I’m considering offering song “sponsorships”. What do you think of the idea? Would you like to dedicate a song to someone in perpetuity? or simply have it known that you helped provide a valuable resource to our community of singers? Register if you haven’t already, and leave comments on this post!
Google Books, like Project Gutenberg and the Million Books Project at The Internet Archive, has been a useful player in the expanding digitization of information that has been previously only available in book form. But with the heavyweight resources it has in terms of finance and cooperative agreements, it is pulling far ahead of the latter two increasing in its usefulness as a digital library.
One case in point is the amount of music now available for download, in high resolution (600 dpi), searchable pdf files. I’ve found a number of good song and aria collections that are available in full view mode. They can be a bit hard to discover, since they are somewhat poorly tagged, but I’ve spent several hours doing targeted searches and am adding a number of them as ASC Sources. Once I’ve transcribed the Table of Contents for each one, it will be easy to search for songs they contain through this site. And since they are available for download from Google, all of that repertoire will be instantly accessible to ASC users.
New additions include much of “The Musicians Library” published by Oliver Ditson Co., a high quality series that saw wide distribution in the first decade of the 20th century. (A number of volumes from this series have been rereleased by Dover.)
I’ve also already added Heart Songs, a huge collection of popular hits and “oldies” from about the same period. While the songs it contains are generally not appropriate for the concert stage, it contains many pieces that are widely known and thus useful for group singing. (I also discovered a few fun pieces therein with which I was utterly unfamiliar.) The arrangements are a mix of four part harmony and solo voice with piano.
Update: I’ve started some similar searches at the Internet Archive, and am amazed at what is also available there. So far, the two collections complement each other nicely. The Internet Archive collection has the mixed blessing of offering their books principally in djvu format. (The bitonal pdf versions they offer seem rarely of high enough quality to be worthwhile.) Djvu has high quality and better compression than PDF, but needs a specialty viewer.
I’ve recently been made aware of a new resource for singers which has been created by Ohio based pianist Kristian Banatzianou. His new site Pianoaccompaniments.com provides mp3 files of the piano accompaniments for a number of pieces in the standard vocal repertoire, and promises a growing library.
He is also willing to record any songs not currently available for a modest fee, after which he will make the relevant files available on his site for subsequent visitors. The site is uncluttered and ad-free. Users of Art Song Central will feel right at home. This is a great deal, and I encourage people to use his site and help expand the collection he offers.
It’s perhaps a little late to be announcing this, but several months ago, the entire contents of “Echoes of Naples; Thirty Neapolitan Songs” were uploaded. Song posts have not been created yet for most of the songs.
This will increasingly become the norm for uploaded content, with the hope that volunteers will step up to help create the detailed song posts. To volunteer, please register, and then use the contact form to express your interest. Thanks!
A few days ago, Art Song Central received its very first donation through Paypal! There has also been small, steady stream of purchases through our affiliate links to Sheet Music Plus; almost enough to cover hosting expenses for the last month or two.
A big thank you to all who have helped support the site in this way!
While progress on expanding and improving the site has been slow recently, the traffic on Art Song Central has continued to grow by about 50% per month. Your support through Paypal and using our affiliate links is crucial to our continued success, especially as we would like to keep this site uncluttered and essentially ad-free.
Meanwhile, continue to tell your friends about this resource!
It has always been the intent of this site to be more than just an archive of sheet music. Steps have now been taken to broaden the scope of our offerings.
There is a new section linked from the sidebar, which lists other resources for singers and voice teachers. This section will include both public domain materials and some copyrighted material I’ve created myself.
I’ve retagged a couple posts to fit in this category, and have started it off with some new additions, including a quick guide to IPA and a novice’s guide to the notes on the keyboard.
Coming soon will be a book of sightreading exercises, and William Shakespeare’s book “The Art of Singing.”
The pace of creating song posts is at times tedious, especially when dealing with pieces which are falsely attributed or by authors or composers who are now obscure.
This has been the case with a number of the pieces in the Parisotti Anthology, so to speed access to the sheet music itself, I have added links to the PDF files for the remainder of the songs, next to their entries on the source page. This way, if someone uses the search function of the site, they can get the sheet music for these pieces even if a song post has not been created yet.
Song posts will follow in due course.
I’ve referenced the International Music Score Library Project several times on this site, and was troubled when it shut down last month in response to a cease and desist letter. The letter from a law firm representing Austrian publisher Universal Edition insisted that IMSLP, a Canadian organization on Canadian servers, had to block access to Europeans of material still in copyright there.
However, much like the temporary shut down of The Lied and Art Song Texts Page under similar circumstances a few years ago, I think the utter shut down of the site was a little bit of an overreaction. I’m particularly disappointed that the owner of IMSLP didn’t take Michael Hart up on his offer to temporarily host all the US-legal stuff on Project Gutenberg’s servers.
Curiously, both sites are based in Canada, and I don’t know how much bearing Canadian law has on their viability. I’m relieved to know that Project Gutenberg, backed by a small army of volunteer lawyers, has maintained a firm line in the sand regarding such issues. They have stringent rules by which they determine what they can host, but they have successfully beaten back the IP bullies who have tried to prevent them from serving public domain materials that may still be in copyright in other countries.
Fortunately, I follow PG’s rules in considering what I can put on this website. I’m glad to know that if I were served with a similar letter, I would have a host of precedent to protect me, as well as supportive organizations like PG and the Internet Archive prepared to offer me cover.
Finally, while I had some reservations about some of the ways IMSLP pushed the envelope of legality, as well as concerns about quality control, I do hope the majority of that site will quickly find its way back online. I’d especially like to avoid having to scan the complete songs of Schubert myself, since they had apparently already done so!
Through a strong weekend push, all of the numbers from Parisotti’s Anthology of Italian Song volume 1 have now had posts created. (Including the last one, which seems to actually have its original text in French.)
This also pushes our total song posting count above 130.
Growth of the site has been slow for the last month, but we’re now up to about 110 song posts, and there’s been a lot of work behind the scenes. (Many new songs have been scanned!)
However, I’ve recently added some new resources and added some aids to navigate the site better.
For the record, one of the reasons for the slow pace of additional song posts is that I’ve only wanted to add material that is truly useful and popular. There is no “dead wood” in this collection. I’ve also been trying to keep the collection somewhat balanced. (ie: I’d rather add some spirituals before I add more Schubert.)
However, listing the song posts by language makes it easier to see some of the other gaps in the collection. I’ll be looking to add more Spanish material, and diversify the composers represented in all languages a bit more.
Adding song posts is the most time consuming part of this process, and I would be delighted to have help in researching and writing more of them… Please let me know if you’re willing to help in this area! (This should be especially easy for songs which can be found in IMSLP, though I’m not interested in referencing material there that is of low quality, such as the scans from the IU Variations Project.)
Thanks,
David
Before I start putting up lots of songs, I want to make sure I have the format set for song posts. I’m still making some refinements to the first one before I continue.
I’m also refining the mission somewhat. For the moment, I will give more attention to putting up song pages for things that have already been posted by respected archives on the Internet. I will still post my own scans, but I want singers and voice teachers to have one centralized location where they can find a good selection of songs and quick links to supplemental information. I can build this more quickly and completely by starting with things that already exist online, but may be hard to find.
In the same spirit, I will eventually set up song pages for works that are not yet in the public domain, with links to where one can buy them. However, this is not yet a priority.
Not much to report yet. Found an appropriate look for the site, and will be preparing content this summer. Starting with baby steps, as I have several more pressing projects on my plate.
Ultimately, this site will contain individual pdf files for each of about 2000 songs for which I’ve collected public domain sheet music, and more as I find and scan them. Unlike PD sheet music collections currently available, this will include many pieces from the “standard repertoire” for singers taking formal classical lessons. It is my hope that this will give students access to a wider range of pre-1923 vocal music, and free them to spend more of their sheet music budgets on 20th and 21st century works.
(I should remember to include a list of some of my favorite 20th century art song composers for this purpose! Some, like Ives, Bernstein and Copland, are well known. Others, like Bacon, Hundley, Musto, Hoiby, and Heggie, seem to only be well known within certain circles.)
I’ll probably be granting access to my students as I go, and make it more public as it starts to be large enough to be worthwhile. I was also going to tie it in with IPASource.com, but they recently decided to charge for access. Perhaps I’ll just have to create similar material myself.
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Free sheet music for singers and voice teachers
