If you’re anything like me, you wrote a Rails/Postgres app (in my case a search engine for early vocal music), threw it on Heroku, and are now paying $50/mo for 1GB of RAM while add-ons get discontinued and prices go up. You don’t know much about infrastructure and don’t want to follow a 27-step AWS tutorial only to find yourself locked into one vendor. You tried startup solutions like Fly and Render but encountered bugs and poor support. You need staging/production environments and decent uptime. And you’re a classical singer who can’t be worrying about server uptime during concerts.
…
Read more ›
Well, I think we’ve been Haydn this for long enough: you can now search every last movement of Haydn’s vocal works by instrumentation, title, and key, for a total of 1,769 movements. You’ll find lots of gems in here, like Scottish folk song arrangements, silly canons, operas I’d never heard of, and much more.
…
Read more ›
One of VMII’s newest cataloguers, Elizabeth Pineo, has just finished adding textual references for all the Bach cantatas, including scripture readings, verbatim/paraphrase quotations, and more. She started in December and has quietly and carefully soldiered on until finishing just now! Elizabeth says:
…
Read more ›
This may be hard to handle, but we’ve finished cataloguing Messiah, Israel in Egypt, Esther, La resurrezione, Brockes-Passion, Athalia, Saul, L’Allegro, Samson, Belshazzar, Occasional Oratorio, Susanna, Solomon, and Theodora — for a total of 10,654 movements!
…
Read more ›
Diapason Magazine today called us “An invaluable resource for amateurs and professionals in search of repertoire.” Pas mal !
…
Read more ›
Since 4915 movements didn’t seem like enough, we’re announcing new VMII data today — thanks to new contributor extraordinaire, Emma Clarkson.
…
Read more ›
Anne has decided to stop working on www.vmii.org as she starts her French pastry course. Please join me in thanking her for the nearly 9,000 movements (many coming soon) that she’s catalogued!
…
Read more ›
Today we finished cataloguing 284 movements from Jacquet de La Guerre’s cantatas and opera. When we posted about this on Facebook, it “helpfully” translated Jacquet de La Guerre to “Jackets of War.” Though her music doesn’t have much in the way of jackets or war, it’s gorgeous and deserves to be performed more often. Hopefully now that it’s catalogued alongside more common composers like JS Bach, this will finally happen!
…
Read more ›
I first studied French baroque music with Peter Harvey and Claire Guimond at Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute. I fell in love with it, and I’ve been excited to make this repertoire easier to find via VMII.
…
Read more ›
When Anne was feverishly cataloguing the 2,000+ movements of JS Bach, she kept saying “What’ll really be great is to have CPE.” Anne has long loved CPE’s gorgeous flute music, and I had long been embarrassingly ignorant about it.
…
Read more ›
Clérambault wrote beautiful cantatas that deserve to be performed much more often. So we used facsimiles to catalogue all 151 movements of his Book I–V cantatas (with instrumentation, key, meter, number of measures), and now you can browse them here!
…
Read more ›
As a singer, I often wish I had a way to browse Bach cantata arias by instrument combinations or textual themes. Fortunately, I recently found myself stuck in a pandemic with nothing but a computer and a French baroque flautist for company.
…
Read more ›