“An invaluable resource for amateurs and professionals in search of repertoire!”
– Diapason Magazine
New Technology Prize
– European Early Music Network
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VMII lets you search thousands of movements of early vocal music by instrumentation, text, key, meter, range, and occasion. VMII has been featured by the music libraries of Juilliard, Royal Academy of Music, Yale, Curtis, Univ. of California (Berkeley), Stanford, Univ. of Michigan, Oberlin, Univ. of Helsinki, Carleton, Univ. of Texas and Brigham Young. In the past year, more than 100,000 people used the site.
Our cataloguers start with facsimiles or critical editions and work one movement at a time, carefully cataloguing original instrument names, editorial suggestions, and alternate versions. Many entries include texts, keys, meters, and ranges, which are all searchable.
Baritone Ben Kazez has performed as soloist in Europe and the US under Václav Luks, Christian Curnyn, Dame Sarah Connolly, and Mark Padmore. He has sung in the Netherlands Bach Society and the Monteverdi Choir (Sir John Eliot Gardiner) at venues including the Salzburg Festival, BBC Proms Royal Albert Hall, Versailles, Vienna Musikverein, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and Berlin Philharmonie. Email Ben ›
Elizabeth Pineo is working toward her Master’s of Library and Information Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where her research focuses on representations of marginalized groups in music archives. She is a classically trained pianist, and she holds a BA in Music from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Emma Clarkson is an arts administrator, stage manager, and amateur baroque violinist. She has a BA in English from Yale, where she worked with the Yale Baroque Opera Project and the Tiny Baroque Orchestra of Pierson College. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Library and Information Science at the University of Washington.
Pedro Pastor is a Brazilian music student currently pursuing his undergraduate degree in Music Education at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). His main background is in choral music. He joined his first choir in elementary school and traveled around Brazil to perform. Currently, Pedro is focusing his studies on text-music relations and rhetoric in the baroque period.
Thomas Weis is currently a music performance major at Wittenberg University and is studying piano and playing violin in the school’s orchestra. He is also studying for his BA in computer science and looking to go into cybersecurity.
Daniel Kazez is professor of music at Wittenberg University (USA). As a cellist he has given solo recitals in London, Paris, Brussels, Salzburg, Cardiff, Florence, Rome, and Bangkok, and at international music festivals in Berlin, Prague, and India, where he also recorded for Bollywood. He has published a dozen scholarly articles on music theory and pedagogy, a dozen editions of music, and books including Rhythm Reading (W. W. Norton), the most widely used rhythm textbook in the U.S.
Our Handel Opera Team includes an anonymous volunteer, as well as Daniel Kazez, Oliva Clayton, Emma Clarkson, and Anne Charrier.
Team Buxtehude includes Pedro Pastor, Nelia Marie Koontz, Mya Ballin, Sacha Schneider, Virginia Schneider, Jordan Good, and May Robertson.
Special thanks to those who kindly offered financial donations: Andrea LeBlanc, Kathleen McDonald, William Stewart, and anonymous others. We use your contributions exclusively to cover server costs and purchase scores to catalogue. Thank you!
In the last month, 15,000 people used VMII to discover early vocal music. But we only need two $10 donors to cover our server costs. If you find VMII useful, please give what you can!
Thanks to Katie Boardman, Robert Bringhurst, Vijay Chalasani, Olivia Clayton, Pamela Dellal, Martin Dittmar, Colin Donihue, Daniel Kazez, Michelle Koth, Steve Marquardt, Brian Mason, Catriona McDermid, Charlotte Nediger, the Packard Humanities Institute, Michael Peterson, Emma Seibert, Andrew Wong, and everyone else who has helped!
We’d love to hear from you!
Check out our blog, Cataloguer’s Corner, to be the first to learn of new repertoire.