Cayvan Choral Music Database

CCMD: Advanced Search Help

The Advanced Search allows you to construct complex searches; up to three search strings can be combined using the Boolean operators AND and OR (i.e., combining title, composer and instrumentation in one search). You may also choose how you want your results sorted, and you can limit in a variety of ways. See below on different ways to limit your searches

The indexes available for searching are:

Title: use exact title of the piece you are looking for or keywords from the title, if you don’t know the full title. Example: “rose” and “Sharon” for the anthem “I Am the Rose of Sharon”.

Composer: The original creator of a work. Type in either the full name (“William Billings” or “Billings, William), or the last name of the composer if you do not know the full name.

Arranger: If the composer is not known, as with most folk tunes and spirituals, there may be an arranger. An arranger transfers a composition from one medium to another, or simplifies/elaborates upon a piece with or without a change of medium. Search either by the full name (“Marshall Bartholomew”) or last name (“Bartholomew”).

Editor: An editor prepares a piece of music for publication, performance or study. This is usually not the same person as the composer. Search for editor as you would for composer or arranger (“Alice Parker”, “Kenneth Jennings”).

Text Author: If you have a favorite poet and wonder if his or her poems have been set to music, try a text author search. For example, the composer Randall Thompson set a collection of texts by Robert Frost to music, and named the collection “Frostiana.” A search on the text author “Frost” will help you to find the entire set. A search on the text author “Biblical” will yield well over a hundred results. This search is useful if you are looking for choral texts taken directly from the Bible.

Notes: This is a good place to look for solos. If you are looking for pieces that include a baritone solo, for example type “baritone” or “baritone solo” to pull up the records. The notes search is also helpful for finding pieces that have been commissioned for choirs. Simply type the word “commissioned” to find all of these.

Instrumentation: Type in the name of the instrument you want, such as “organ” or “oboe”, and you will find pieces that use these instruments in the accompaniment. You may combine two instruments in one search (i.e., “piano” and “flute”) in order to find pieces that have both of these accompanying instruments.

Publisher: If you have a favorite publisher or know a particular publisher that is reputable, try searching under that name (for example �Earthsongs�, or �Concordia�). This is not an exact search, so if you know just part of the publisher name you can still get results. For example, �Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.� may be searched under �Boosey.� This is especially useful if you cannot think of the full corporate name. Each piece in the CCMD may be searched by publisher.

Biblical Source: This may be especially useful to worship planners and church choir directors. If you are planning a service around a passage, try searching for the exact passage (chapter & verse). If that yields no results, go a bit more general and just search for the chapter. This search, like the one above, is a keyword search rather than an exact phrase search. This means you may pull up results that match some but not all of your criteria. For example, if you search the database for �John 1:1�, you will get results for John 1:1 and John 1:14.

Program Notes: Some of the records in CCMD include program notes from actual concerts performed at Calvin College by Calvin choral ensembles. You may want to use this search to find out more about a piece that you are performing. For example, if you are doing �Now thank we all our God� edited by Ifor Jones, you may search for that title in the database and read about the history of the work. To pull up all program notes, search for a very simple word or article, such as �a� or �the�.

CCMD: Limiting Features

Limiting is helpful if you want to find a group of pieces that all have a similar feature or features; for example, you might be looking for choral pieces written only in the 20th century or pieces only in English. The CCMD currently allows you to limit by language, musical period and voicing.

There are 10 languages included in the “text language” search. We will be adding to these as the need arises.

“Musical period” requires some explaining. Users should understand this limiting feature to mean the literal dates of each period in music history and not the musical style. For example, 20th century refers to music written in the 1900s and “Romantic” to the period from 1815-1915. The Classic area date range is 1750 to 1825. It overlaps slightly with the Romantic era. Baroque is defined as the period from 1600 to 1750 (death of J.S. Bach). Renaissance is the earliest of the music periods in the database (1400-1600). You can search by any one of these periods alone, without entering a search term. For example, if you want to find all of the Renaissance pieces in the database, simply limit to “Renaissance” and you will have a complete list.

There are composers that may not be considered Classical or Romantic, even though they wrote during those time periods. For example, William Billings lived during the Classical era, but his music is not considered Classical. We apologize for any confusion this might cause. Some composers simply defy categorization, but we had to assign each a category, nevertheless.