This website is provided and maintained by me, Sheila Crossey. Please feel free to come and chat with me at rehearsals about any of this – you'll find me in the alto section. Or you can send me email, but to avoid spam I'm not posting my email address here. You can get it from the mass mailings I occasionally send to the TCS membership list or from the contact sheet which was handed out earlier in the year.
This is a resource for TCS members who like, or think they might like, to learn music by singing with their computers. The way it works is that you sing looking at your usual hardcopy score, with your computer acting as a very obedient accompanist responding to your whims and instructions. To get the full benefit, you need two things: a midi file for the particular piece of music you are rehearsing, and the right sort of software midi player to play it.
Midi files are a synthetic digital form of the music and are available free on the internet for a wide variety of choral classical music. See below for links to the music we're performing in the 2007 - 2008 season. You can simply click on a link to a midi file, your browser will launch a midi player, and you will hear the music; but, if you settle for this, you will miss out in a major way and will likely be disappointed. True, you will hear the music, but the player launched by the browser will not give you much control, as it will allow you to do only simple things such as pausing and rewinding. To do the really useful things – adjusting the volume of each part independently, changing the speed (without affecting the pitch), and selecting which bar to start on – you will have to take the trouble to install and learn how to use a more fully-featured midi player.
Luckily, a number of excellent midi players with the right features for rehearsing are available for free – my favourite is Melody Assistant. To learn how to install and use it, read Midi hints. Note that once you've installed such a midi player, you still won't be able simply click on the link to the midi file in your browser; instead, you'll have to download the midi file and save it to your local hard drive first, and then launch your midi player (e.g. Melody Assistant) and open the file. How to do this is explained in Midi hints .
Choral Public Domain Library Search for "Bach Christmas Oratorio". There are a bunch of PDF files listed first, so scroll past these to get to the midi files.
Dave's J.S. Bach Page This takes you right to the Oratorio.
Cyberbass This takes you right to the Oratorio.
Cyberbass This should take you to the Handel section where the 4 Coronation Anthems are listed. Click on whichever one you want to get to the midi files.
The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive website has midi files for everything we're doing. If you scroll over the operas at the left, another menu comes up. Simply click on "Web Opera" for the one you are looking for. From there, click on the song you want to listen to, then click midi file link (part way down the screen on the left). Or you can use the links below which take you directly to the songs.
Entrance of the Peers (Iolanthe)
Wand'ring Minstrel (Mikado)
Three Little Maids (Mikado)
Dance a Cachuka (Gondoliers)
Poor Wand'ring One (Pirates of Penzance)
Gama's Song (Princess Ida)
Act 2 Finale (H.M.S. Pinafore)
Sylvis Woodshed Scroll down to Haydn and look for the Creation. I've tried the one with accomp. D Drew and it seems OK. Note that it's a zip file.
Cyberbass - The Creation This takes you straight to The Creation.