Dear friends and users of Musica,


It’s been a while since you’ve received any MusicaMail from us ­ we’ve been busy with an extensive development on the Musica International project for choral music repertoire, but we’re now ready to send you some exciting announcements.


1) Musica is now fully interactive!

A new era is starting these days with 3 major new features that are being opened for user input and comments. They will extend and add value to the 50 person-years of work already invested in the building of the worldwide Musica database of choral repertoire and the virtual multimedia choral library.

- a) The MusicaWiki : each of the 160,000 titles referenced in Musica has now an extension that is a free open space ...

Share and directly enrich Musica with your opinions and comments.
And especially:
              + Composers: you can add data about your own works.
              + Conductors: you can share your experiences with a work.
              + Musicologists: you can enrich the Musica records with your knowledge.

To do so, just connect to www.musicanet.org , search for a title in the database, display the detailed record and click on the MusicaWiki button!

See also: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=161738270522325#!/event.php?eid=161738270522325

- b) Musica version 6: it provides to all privileged users of Musicanet.org the possibility of direct on-line input of new records into the master database. It is now being rolled out in stages and will become completely open to all privileged users in November.
Especially:
              + Publishers: with this feature, you can accelerate the presence of your publications in Musica and describe them yourself for optimal correctness.
              + Composers: you can complete yourself the list of your works in Musica

To find out how you can begin benefitting right away from this new feature, write to office@musicanet.org


- c) Creating "private fields" in the Musica database for every institution, in order to input, for instance, your locations of the choral scores in your library. Display of these locations can then either be "private" or "public" in the web pages of Musicanet.org .
Especially:
              + Music libraries: the referencing of your holdings can be publicly seen in Musicanet.org
              + Choirs: your choir library can be computerized and available on-line without need to create your own database for managing it. You may find that many of the scores are already described in Musica, so that you have only to add the existence and number of copies in your private fields of the Musica record. For the score not yet referenced in Musica, you will be able to contribute to the expansion of the Musica cooperative project by using the previous feature b), described above.

This feature will be available very soon. Get in touch with us now to inform us of your interest in this feature.

2) News from our members:

- IFCM: be part of the "World Choral Day" on December 12, 2010.
For the promotion of solidarity, peace, and understanding through Choral Singing. More information at http://www.ifcm.net/public/doc/665.pdf

- Bagaduce Music Lending Library in Musica: the Bagaduce Music Lending Library is now listing some of their holdings in MUSICA. BMLL is a non-profit lending library located in Maine, USA, which lends to members around the world. Anyone may become a member.

Their collection contains 215,000 printed music titles for all styles and arrangements, including multiple copies of over 2000 major choral works.

It can be browsed and borrowed at www.bagaducemusic.org.

- ACDA: National Convention of the American Choral Directors Association in Chicago, March 9-12, 2011. Registration has started. Musica International will be present at the convention. Already schedule a visit on our booth of the expo, and watch for the Reading Session on the Musica International project in the program od the convention.


3) Fund drive:

You probably can imagine that all these new developments needed and still need money to come to their completion. Probably because of the world's financial crisis, we are now experiencing a drop in the amounts of the donations, whereas at the same time these new developments have increased our costs.

We will start our annual fund drive in November, but feel free to already donate by going to http://www.musicanet.org/en/donation.php

Cordially,
The Musica International team
office@musicanet.org