Printed music is a big investment. That’s why singers and teachers photocopy music. That, or because the music is hard to get, or out of print, easily available at the library, or already in public domain. Sometimes, you only want one song out of a $40 book, and it’s hard to bite the bullet and invest in an edition you want. Sometimes there’s more than one edition, but the less expensive one has more ‘misprints’. Yet it doesn’t matter why one photocopies music, as for the most part, it’s an illegal practice. If the word ‘copyright’ appears on it, it’s illegal to copy it. End of lecture.
Theodore Presser has tackled this problem head on by ‘publishing’ CD-ROMs with the sheet music digitally encoded on the disk, ready for printout. The new sheet music series of CDs contains the complete sheet music and texts, as well as a slightly clunky but fairly easy to use table of contents that allows easy navigation of the CD.
CD-ROMs are like music CDs, except they’re read by computer CD-ROM drives (‘rom’ stands for ‘read-only memory’). The CD-ROM format is now standard for most computer software programs, and material that would otherwise only be available in weighty tomes, such as a dictionaries or user manuals, can now usually be found in a CD-ROM version. They’re cheap to manufacture, can be printed from, and can carry a lot of data, thus saving money all around. And now the music business is catching up to this wave.
With a computer, printer and CD-ROM drive, you can have a huge music library of arias right on your desktop. Currently available are five CDs of vocal music. Sold separately, each CD contains arias for soprano, mezzo, tenor and bass, as well as Italian art songs in the high or low key. Also available is a single volume of Schubert songs. These CDs contain only material already available in the public domain, so there’s no risk of copyright infringement. The aria CDs contain most of the standard repertoire, as well as a few of the lesser known arias—for example, the soprano CD includes Campra’s ‘Charmant papillon’ from Les Fêtes Vénitiennes. Where else can you get music for the Immolation Scene from Götterdammerung alongside a Pergolesi aria? The tenor aria album contains 148 arias plus 86 early Italian art songs; Parsifal and Gluck together, in the same book! Each CD costs just $18.95, meaning this extremely wide range of repertoire gives one—or one’s students—the chance to try out just about any rep for a minimal cost, and no hassle.
The editions seem quite good and are taken from sources such as Peters, Breitkopf, and Ricordi. The ‘Depuis le jour’, from Massenet’s Louise, contains all of Massenet’s fussy metronomic markings, as well as lots of piano markings. Some of the arias contain the original language text on the second line, with the English translation on the first line, but ‘Nun eilt herbei’ comes without translation. But these are minor irritants. Besides, we’re supposed to be doing our own translations, right? Those translations which do accompany arias are reasonable ones, and are certainly better than the silly, rhyming ones which have long been out of date.
The quality of the printed copy is good, but that can vary according to the type and quality of printer you have. Another good feature is that not too much is crammed onto one page once it’s printed out, and it’s all in a reasonable, readable sized print. There’s no limit to how many times you can print from these CDs, and you can do it guilt free!
On the Complete Schubert Songs CD, all the songs come on one CD, but are all in their original keys, which is disappointing. There are currently no transpositions available, and as Adobe Acrobat is strictly a PDF reader, it isn’t possible to do transpositions. I didn’t have a copy of this CD to review, but if it’s anything like the aria CDs at a similar price, it’s worth having just for reference.
Plans for future sheet music CD publications include the complete opera scores of Puccini, Verdi and Wagner. Also planned are the complete choral church cantatas of Bach, and three CDs of German Lieder divided into collections of early, mid- and late-Romantic lieder. And if you need some ideas, buy the Ultimate Collection of Vocal Exercises. Should be like Conconi on steroids.
At www.presser.com or www.cdsheetmusic.com, you can take a virtual tour of the CDs, check out the current titles, and see what other things will be forthcoming. You can also see who in your area retails these CDs, or where to order online. Since these CDs cut into the revenues of standard music stores, they aren’t always available locally, but that should change once demand is shown. For the price, even for twice the price, these CDs are a terrific bargain for singers, teachers and students.
The software requirements for running this program are Windows 95 or higher, Mac v7.5 or higher, and Adobe Acrobat 4.05 (included with the program). Hardware requirements are a computer CD-ROM player and printer.
Annette Nauraine is a singer and has contributed several articles to Classical Singer.
