The decision was made recently to put Harmonic Patina on hold for about a year until our members are more available to make it work. I am saddened by this, but am the first to acknowledge that projects have to flow and when you are repeatedly coming up against conflicts, there's no sense in forcing it. We all have other places to focus our energies currently, and hopefully we can revisit the idea later with renewed zeal.
Meanwhile, rehearsals are underway for DeCantus, I am working to increase my wedding/funeral repertoire, and the Quartet is learning more new pieces for the Homecoming Weekend at Presentation. I am quickly drowning under all this sheet music! I am definitely in need of a new organizational system for my music, but, besides the obvious space issues, I don't know where to begin. Should I file strictly alphabetically? By language? By season? By style? So many pieces cross genres that I'm constantly pulling them out and putting them back in different places. Any ideas, fellow musicians? How do you organize?
Design a database or even excel spread sheet to set up sort fields using your cross reference topics. Number each item based on published/composition date and composer initials(1750JSB)this should allow you to easily add new titles into the system. If you have fields like composer, title, popular artist, season, style, period, language,purpose(wedding) you could sort the document by any field and easily find items. Replacing them in the same location would be easy based on the number(file code)you write at the top.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've had for years and has worked perfectly, was to use an accordion file (however many you need). I have my songs separated by aria section (one slot per language), art section (one slot per language), musical theater/gospel. I have a separate binder for sacred music with the psalms, acclamations and hyms in the front, by category, and the sacred solos in the back. Everything is sorted alphabetically within it's section/slot. Hope this helps!
ReplyDeleteTasha