What was new in 2004
- March 1
- Update on activity: I tried to replace the current site with the overhauled version but because a lot of pages are still pretty slow and I have a rather slow mechanism in place that tries to redirect people to where they seem to want to go, the requests over the next fifteen minutes nearly brought the server down. So I'm going to work on that in the next few days and try again. In the meantime, I've got a lot of updates there.
What was new in 2003
- December 18
- Update on activity: I've got about 98% of the collection
in the database now, and most of the new site layout and
functionality finished. I'm still honing it and trying to make things
faster.
Would you like to help? Here's a sneak peek of the new site. Feedback is welcome!
- Update on activity: I've got about 98% of the collection
in the database now, and most of the new site layout and
functionality finished. I'm still honing it and trying to make things
faster.
- October 14
- Added some translations here and there
- Update on activity
- Some of you have been wondering at the length of time between
updates and the relatively small number of additions. I have actually
been very, very busy with this website, but I have nothing I can show
just yet. I'm finally moving all the texts to a database.
"WHAT?" you may very well exclaim, "But -- isn't everything already in a database?"
Sadly, no. Everything is in HTML files. All the cross-referencing and a lot of the indexing is done by hand. I've written Perl scripts to generate indexes of first lines and titles and indexes by language, but they all have to sift through HTML files. This means that if I want to change the look of the site I have to edit a huge number of HTML files, or write a complicated program to parse them and figure out where to make the change (since it could be different for each file). This also means that if I have to change any composer or poet information, I have to change possibly hundreds of files by hand (for example, if I had Schubert's dates wrong, I'd have to change over 600 files). And finally, this means that adding even one translation can take an hour, as I add the icon for the language to each composer index. If there are twenty settings, that's an extra twenty files to edit.
I'm not quite kicking myself for not starting the project with a database, however - I think that the schema I have now fits all my requirements, but I would not have been able to guess my requirements in the very beginning.
In any case, over the past two years I've been feeling more and more strongly about converting to database. With over 13,000 texts to convert, this is both an exciting and tedious task. It's daunting, too. It involves parsing all the HTML files that make up this website, verifying that the parse succeeded for each file, and adding all the cross-referencing (all those extra nuggets of information such as "also set in German by so and so" - something difficult to do automatically). And of course, once I have the database filled, I need to display the data on the website.
I'm using home-made tools written in Perl, and a database schema developed last year with the help of a friend (thank you Collette!). So far I've converted about 90% of the collection. What remains are files with exceptional data that I must deal with by hand. I've already developed the layout of the new site using a templating toolkit called Mason, and I'll be using the CPAN module Class::DBI to access the database.
I continue to post visitor requests on the wishlist and send requestors texts and translations as I receive them, but I will not be posting large numbers of texts on the site itself for a little while longer. Once I finish my database work I'll be able to add material more frequently, and with much more efficiency.
To everyone who has been sending me material, thank you so much! And thank you for your patience in waiting for texts to appear on the site while I'm slogging away in database limbo.
- Some of you have been wondering at the length of time between
updates and the relatively small number of additions. I have actually
been very, very busy with this website, but I have nothing I can show
just yet. I'm finally moving all the texts to a database.
- August 14 (256 new songs)
- Some translations to French
- Added original Italian texts to Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch (46) (Italian Songbook)
- Monteverdi
- Libro quarto dei Madrigali (20)
- Libro quinto dei Madrigali (19)
- Kabalevsky: Desjat' sonetov Shekspira (10), op. 52
- Gurney: Lights Out (6)
- Schoenberg: Vier Stücke für gemischten Chor (4)
- Separate vocal pieces including those by
Bizet (1)
Berlioz (15)
Catalani (14)
Crabtree (7)
Donizetti (4)
Dufay (72)
Lehár (1)
Nevin (1)
Schoenberg (34)
Schubert (1)
- May 31 (86 new songs)
- Various corrections, simplifications, standardizations, etc.
- Over thirty translations to English, French, German, Dutch and Portuguese (not indexed yet)
- Hindemith: Six Chansons (6)
- A. Taylor
- Four Songs of Calm, op. 28 (4) [choral]
- 2 separate songs
- Leighton: 5 Shakespeare Songs (5)
- Separate vocal pieces including those by
Bellini (1)
Brambilla (1)
Britten (1)
Distler (1)
Donizetti (1)
Fétis (1)
Gibbs (1)
Griffes (1)
Hovhaness (1)
James (1)
Leoncavallo (1)
Loewe (1)
Monteverdi (1)
Ponchielli (1)
Puccini (1)
Rico (12)
Rorem (3)
Rossini (34)
A. Scarlatti (1)
Tosti (1)
Saint-Saëns (1)
Vaccaj (1)
Verdi (1)
- March 20 (158 new songs)
- Some restructuring - translations are no longer displayed in parallel but rather below the original text. (This is in preparation for a much larger restructuring to take place in a few months)
- Over fifty new translations to English and Dutch
- Cyrillic now displayed in Unicode
- Lehmann: Bird Songs (5)
- Gibbs
- Songs of the Mad Sea Captain (4)
- 19 separate songs
- de Lassus
- Prophetiae Sibyllarum (13)
- Standomi un giorno (6)
- 10 separate vocal pieces
- Debussy: Chansons de Bilitis (12) (Songs of Bilitis) [incidental music to accompany the recitation of twelve prose poems of Pierre Louÿs]
- Telemann: Der Schulmeister (5)
- Mozart
- Zwei deutsche Kirchenlieder (2), K343/336c
- 5 separate Lieder
- Separate vocal pieces by
Baumgartner (1)
de Bertrand (1)
Boni (1)
Brahms (1)
Bruckner (2)
Costeley (1)
Gounod (1)
Finzi (1)
Kodály (1)
Manneke (1)
Manno (4)
Marx (1)
Monteverdi (1)
da Motta (1)
Nees (1)
Petersen (1)
W. Porter (19)
Purcell (7)
Quilter (3)
Reimann (1)
Rossini (7)
A. Scarlatti (4)
Schoeck (11)
Schroyens (1)
Sorabji (1)
Viardot-Garcia (1)
- January 31
- Rewrote the Guestbook in PHP.
- January 25 (94 new songs)
- Over seventy new translations to English and French
- Durey
- Deux Lieder Romantiques, op. 20 (2)
- Épigrammes de Théocrite (4), op. 13 (Epigrams of Theocritus)
- Images à Crusoé (7), op. 11 (Images of Crusoe)
- Inscriptions sur un Oranger (2), op. 16
- Le Bestiaire (30), op. 17a (The bestiary)
- Trois Poèmes de Pétrone (3), op. 15 (Three Poems by Petronius)
- Rodrigo
- Dos canciones para cantar a los niños (2)
- Tres Villancicos (3)
- 6 separate songs
- Toldrà: Nou cançons populars catalanes (9)
- La Montaine: Songs of the Nativity (6)
- Vierne: Les Angélus (The Angelus) (3)
- Separate songs by
Bataille (1)
Boësset (1)
Caccini (1)
Frescobaldi (1)
E. Halffter (1)
Haydn (1)
R. Johnson (1)
Kienzl (1)
Landi (1)
Mozart (5)
Vaughan Williams (1)
White (1)