Musica – A Great Benefit for ACDA Members

Blog from Tim Sharp

 

Musica…A great benefit for ACDA members.

If you are searching for choral repertoire, and the fact is, we are indeed searching 

for choral repertoire all the time, your membership in the American Choral 

Directors Association offers you the entire Musica choral database to track down 

repertoire throughout the world. 

 

Why would you use Musica rather than a Google search? Great question! Here 

are some answers I think you will find compelling:

1) The Musica database references the score for the choral piece you want to 

find and does not drown in all other areas that you will encounter in a 

typical Google search;

2) Music is a structured database, which means there exists a specific field for 

each type of information describing a score—composer, title, voicing, 

number of voices, key center, genre, style, form, instrumentation, liturgical 

use, and much more (for example, try searching in Google for Swiss choral 

scores for mixed voices in French, for a harvest festival, lasting about five 

minutes….Good luck with that! But in Music, your search can be pinpointed 

with these criteria.)

3) With Musica, fields of a search are grouped, making the search much more 

friendly and faster;

4) In Musica, several search forms are available for the user who can choose 

the one that is best suited to the research desired, or to the one that is 

most comfortable to the user;

5) Musica automatically translates the important data into four languages, 

allowing access to all data, even those introduced in Musica in a language 

other than that used by the visitor; 

6) A Musica record includes all the information about the score into a single 

entity; you will find the bibliographic description, but also the multimedia 

links (video, audio clip, translations, pronunciation of the text, image of the 

page, and more);

7) The information is monitored constantly and checked and improved (in 

other words, it is trusted) by the Musica coordination team, which is a team 

of choral conductors and music librarians (in other words, this is a trusted 

site, avoiding the negative aspects of Wikipedia and Google searches);

8) The videos selected for the choral works sought are only the good 

performances, unlike Google and YouTube that mix the best with the worst;

9) In the composer’s file, nearly 11,000 composers have one or more links to 

detailed biographies, again checked and monitored by the Musica team;

10)Musica offers “favorite pieces of the month” for additional exploration and 

interest;

11)Musica offers an “auditorium” where you can browse through the vast 

compilation of all audio and video links;

12)Musica allow you to interact with the data by using a Musica Wiki or 

Facebook page;

13)Musica offers a list of important anniversaries for composers.

 

Musica has developed into THE choral music research and teaching tool for the 

benefit of conductors, musicologists, music conservatories and schools, music 

federations, and choral music industry members, worldwide. For the experienced 

choral musician, it is the source for discovering literature from around the world. 

For the student of choral music, Musica is a keen way to discover and learn about 

the world of choral repertoire.

 

Musica comprises four databases that can be consulted separately: choral scores-

170,000 records; choral composers-30,000 records; authors of texts-13,000 

records; choral publishers-2,200 records. These databases are interlinked so that 

it is possible to navigate directly between them.

 

The database of scores comprises a series of records yielding as many as 100 

different types of information about the score, including composer, arranger, 

publisher, title, genre, form, difficulty, type of choir, language, musical period, 

instrumentation, etc. About 20 fields are translated automatically through several 

multilingual thesaurus developed by the Musica International team. As a result, 

information is automatically and immediately available in the different languages.

 

Musica currently contains more than 200,000 multimedia links. The multimedia 

fields are designed to provide a fuller understanding of the piece: image of one 

page of the score, the text, its translation in several languages, a sound clip of a 

good interpretation and/or a video, a sound file of the correct pronunciation by a

native speaker of the language, a midi file, and links to pages external of the 

project. By the end of 2015, the Musica database contained more than 170,000 

records, making it the leading virtual library of choral music in which all possible 

information about a score is available. 

 

Since 2011, Musica has concentrated on the development of features allowing full 

interactivity with the actors of choral music. The choral world is able to contribute 

actively to its development through the linked online Musica Wiki, allowing every 

composer, publisher, conductor, musicologist, or choral music lover to leave 

comments, additional information and reports of experiences with the music, and 

to directly input their favorite pieces. 

 

Musica is now a benefit of membership in ACDA. At the Eastern Division ACDA 

Conference in Boston in February, 2016, I will be joined by the Musica Board to 

present an Interest Session on the use of the Musica database with all of the 

features mentioned in this blog. I hope many of you will come and learn from the 

Musica team as they unfold the richness of this choral repertoire search engine 

and learning resource.

 

http://acda.org/resources.asp