Do you wonder where you should start looking on this rather information-dense site?
This guide takes you step-by-step, starting with the most basic and essential stuff, and then progressing to the "good-to-have" stuff that you can do without at first.
It may be confusing if you are viewing this tutorial from a page other than "http://www.evatoller.se/". You can click on "To main page" in the upper left corner of this tutorial, and then you will get to the starting point (you can access the tutorial from the main page, too).
This guide takes you step-by-step, starting with the most basic and essential stuff, and then progressing to the "good-to-have" stuff that you can do without at first.
What you should see at http://www.evatoller.se/ is a narrow area to the left and a wide area to the right, the latter with a headline "Musical arrangements for choir". Observe that you can drag the browser window horisontally, to make the right area wider. If you want to have a better look at the left (narrow) area, go to http://www.evatoller.se/misc.html.
To start with, we will only be concerned with the wide area.
After a little text introduction, you see that there is a headline with "clickable" items:
Mixed Choir, Women's Choir, Men's Choir (on the pages http://www.evatoller.se/main_mixed.html,
http://www.evatoller.se/main_women.html, and http://www.evatoller.se/main_men.html, respectively).
Just click on the type of choir that you want to view and download arrangements for.
(Previously, all arrangements were shown in one single page, but it became too large to be practical).
Mixed Choir, Women's Choir, and Men's Choir are tables with downloadable items. There are also arrangements that cannot be downloaded, namely those that are non-public:
By clicking on any of these mouse-sensitive items, you go directly to the corresponding table. Observe that all the songs (at least the public ones) can no longer be contained in one single page, so for the downloadable tables, you must proceed to pages containing subsets (click on the links "Titles A - H", "Titles I - P", or "Titles R - Ö").
The different columns will be explained by looking at one of the "Mixed choir" sub pages: titles A - D
The songs are in alphabetic order, sorted after title. Observe that they are sorted according to the Swedish alphabet rules; thus, any song whose title starts with Å, Ä or Ö appears last in the table, and V and W may be mixed!
Also observe that all the arrangements are written as a cappella.
This is the title of the song. If you put the mouse cursor directly on a title, a little yellow so-called "tool tip" will be shown for some seconds. It shows the (rough) genre of the piece, for example "Swedish poets", "Italian arias", "Sacred songs", "English renaissance", and so on.
Sometimes the titles are click-sensitive, too (when they are underlined). If you click on such a title, a new browser window opens that shows a simple text file. There, I have written some useful information about the song: for example, performance tips and links to related sites. (I have as an ongoing project to write these tips, so eventually, all songs will have one).
This is the composer - of the music, not the lyrics. Often there is of course only one composer for both music and lyrics (you see the lyrics writer in the next column, "Lyrics").
Many of the composer names are click-sensitive; when you click on one, a new window opens that shows another web site that has information on that composer.
This is the lyricist (text writer, poet). Like composers, many lyricists have related information that you can access through the links. When the composer and lyricist are the same person, and there are different links for them, this is no error - in some cases, I have found several worthwhile sites.
Sometimes there is a remark in this column: "not shown in the score". In that case, the lyrics are still under copyright protection, but the music is not.
This is the year that the piece was arranged.
This shows the language of the piece that is used in the arrangement - observe that this not always the original language! If it is a Swedish text I have used, there is a link to a "Rough English translation" (a simple text file). This is a translation that should give people who don't know any Swedish, but want to sing the song anyway, an inkling of what they are singing about. If the translation is from German, it's really rough, because I only have a basic knowledge of the German language. (However, sometimes I am able to find other people's translations, which are not so "rough").
Unfortunately, I am not good at rhyming (neither in Swedish or English), so these translations are seldom directly singable; whenever I find a singable translation I refer to it in the links in the "Title" column.
This shows the approximate difficulty of the arrangement. There are of course a number of factors that determine which level of difficulty you should assign to a piece. I try to take a lot of factors into consideration and make some kind of "holistic" judgement. Among the factors that would give an arrangement a lable of being "difficult" are the following: complexity of chord progression; large voice ranges requirements; if there are difficult and "unnatural" melodies in the individual voice parts, with hard steps; if there are many voices (like SSAATTBB); if there are fast rhythms that are hard to sing; if the song is very long.
This shows the voice parts; for example, common mixed choir (SATB). However, you can also click on an individual voice part letter and get its part played for you. The voices are coded in simple midi files which, when clicked on, should automatically be played in the player you have installed on your computer (for example, Real Player, Windows Media Player).
There is an identical set of voice part letters with the text "With background" above them. If you play one of these, you hear the other voices softly in the background. The first variant (without background) is good when you want to listen to a clear rendering of your own part. However, for learning purposes, it is mostly better to also hear the other voices in the background.
The playing time length of these voice parts is not necessarily identical to the length of a performance of the whole song; for example, I rarely repeat identical verses. Furthermore, the variants with and without background may differ in length for the same voice part (sometimes a part has no singing to do for a while; when this happens at the start or the end, the silent part is not included in the variant without background).
If you put the mouse cursor directly on a voice part letter, without clicking, a yellow "tool tip" should be shown for some seconds. It shows the range required for the specific part. I use the system common in Sweden and many other countries; if you instead use the system with an octave letter + number, look directly above the whole table. There, you have an explanation of the correspondences between the systems.
Here you can play the arrangement with four different types of instruments. The reasons to have more than one are the following:
As with the former column (with the individual voices), I seldom repeat identical verses here.
I don't put a lot of work into making these midi files, so they are not often very enjoyable to listen to. They are there only to give you a general impression of what an arrangement sounds like.
It is from here that you download the actual sheet music. "Score" is just what it sounds like (the full choral score, each part in a separate stave, and sometimes with chord analysis). "Piano reduction" is a two-stave simplification of the arrangement, which is easier to play on the piano than the full score. There are piano reductions for most of the scores. Both full scores and reductions are in PDF format, so you don't have to download any special music notation program.
The following should work in most browsers: if you want to look at a score or a piano reduction, single-click with the left mouse button on it, and it will open in a new window. Since PDF files can be rather slow to open, you may instead want to save it directly by right-clicking on it (you then get that choice in a pop-up menu; I am not sure, however, that this works with MacIntosh computers).
Many of the scores are made in an old music notation program that is not so good for publishing (for example, I have never managed to handle pick-up beats there). These scores often look a bit ugly, but are hopefully readable anyway. I have as an ongoing project to convert all of these scores to Finale.
(A footnote: you may observe that I often have very few instructions about dynamics, tempo, articulations etc. in my scores. This is a deliberate decision: I think that the conductor should decide how the piece will be performed by him/her. If you want instructions anyway, feel free to ask. The (approximate) tempo you can get directly from the MIDI files, but I can give you other instructions as well.).
If you rather would download many scores at once to your computer, rather than one-by-one, go to the top of the page. Immediately after the texts
You can download all files for either mixed choir, women's choir or men's choir as a package. Alternatively, you can download the files in smaller packages, with a maximum size of 4 MegaBytes per package. I have deliberately kept these files relatively small so that they will be downloadable also for those with slow Internet connections.
Observe: since I have avoided using Å, Ä or Ö as a first letter in filenames, you should look for songs starting with Å under "A" ("aa"), starting with Ä under A ("ae"), and starting with Ö under "O" ("oe").
If you want to have a better look at the left area, go to http://www.evatoller.se/misc.html, and you'll get a full-sized browser window.
There are over two hundred arrangements on this site now, and it may be hard to find one if you are looking for a particular kind of song (for example, easy arrangement for a new choir, or four-part arrangements for a quartet).
Under the text "Sort the songs according to", you can make this easier. Click on one of the sorting criterias - title, melody writer, an so on - and you get a list sorted according to that (exactly how is described below). Observe that all free (downloadable) songs are in the same table, whether they belong to mixed, women's, or men's choir.
I may later include more sorting criteria here. Give me a hint if you particularly miss any such criterion!
You may be looking for a specific song, and not care much what type of choir it is written for (an arrangement can always be rewritten, with a little effort, for another choir type). Then you click on "Title", and a new window opens that shows all songs in that sorting order. Note that the items in the Title column are all in bold characters; whichever sorting criterion you choose, the appropriate column will be in bold characters.
This sorts the arrangements according to (melody) composer. If the song you are looking for is a folk song or something else with an anonymous composer, you will find it under "Traditional". These often include more sorting qualifications, for example the country of origin.
This sorts the arrangements according to lyricist (text writer, poet). Instead of "Traditonal", some songs instead have an "Unknown" lyricist.
This sorts the arrangements according to which year they were written (in ascending order). This may be useful if you have not been visiting this site for a long time, and want to find out quickly what's new.
This sorts the arrangements according to which language they are written in (not always the original one). The songs for which the lyrics are not shown in the score are also included here. There are currently eight languages represented: English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Russian, and Swedish.
This sorts the arrangements according to how difficult I think they are to learn (in order of increasing difficulty).
There are basically five levels: easy, rather easy, medium, rather hard, and hard. However, to get a more precise rating I often mix them (like "Medium/Rather hard"). Sometimes I describe a verse of a song as easy and another as hard; in such cases, the sorting is mostly made according to the lowest (easiest) level.
This sorts the arrangements according to which voice parts that are used. Women's choir comes first, then mixed choir, and men's choir is last. Otherwise, the songs are listed according to how many parts that are needed (for example, SA comes before SSA, which comes before SSAA). It is hard to find a really consistent way to sort like this. Expect from the general sorting order (mixed -> women's -> men's) I have tried to make the sorting behave so that the voices will get "darker and darker". This may not always seem logical (for example, SSAB comes before AT).
This page looks different from the other sorting pages. Here, I have made a table for each genre I have identified (for example, "English renaissance") and put the songs that belong to that genre there. From the genre list in the upper part of the page, you can immediately jump to the genre of your choice.
Sometimes it is hard to classify a song into just one genre, but I have done that anyway, so you will never find the same song in two different genre tables.
The genre classification will change over time, as I write new songs of perhaps totally new genres. Furthermore, it seemed unnecessary to have a table with only one item in it; thus, a new genre is not introduced unless there are at least two songs belonging to it.
The durations are according to my MIDI files (without tempo variations, ritardandos et c.); thus, a song's "real" duration may be shorter or longer than the one given in the table, depending on how you perform it.
The given duration is for all verses of a song, so you may easily shorten many of the songs, by skipping one or several verses.
Immediately below the sorting, I have a link to a page that gives you hints about how you can do this type of sorting. That page is not updated often, so there may be some inaccuracies in it now and then. If you detect any such errors (or cannot make it work according to the instructions), please tell me.
From here, you can immediately download the songs that I added during the latest update. Henceforth, I will have five new songs at approximately every third month.
The full scores of those arrangements that were the most downloaded during the previous month are directly downloadable from here.
Here I list the songs that I am currently working on (or at least planning to work on). Observe that there is no absolute guarantee that they will be concluded at all (not in the near future, anyway). However, if I have already listed the voice parts for a song, it will probably be concluded rather soon (most, but not all of these songs, will then be included in the next update of the site).