Well, the ink is hardly dry on my previous blog post, Web search tips for thematic programming of a concert/recital, and now fellow techie singer Katia H. has created a search tool that searches all of the websites mentioned in my post, in one fell swoop! It’s over at classicalsongsearch.com. It’s still in alpha so there still might be some kinks to work out, but give it a whirl and let Katia know if you have any problems or suggestions!
Grazie mille, Katia!
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So one of the things that’s been sucking away at my time for blog-writing these last couple months is that I’ve been organizing and programming a benefit concert. While hunting for pieces related to the concert themes, it occurred to me to share some of the Google-fu that I use for finding music. I’m sure these tips are old hat to some of you tech-savvy singers, but others might find them useful.
So, one of my objectives was to find vocal solo or small ensemble pieces from the opera, art song, musical theater, or popular genres on the theme of “gold” or “golden”, since the concert benefits an organization celebrating its golden anniversary season. I did this by using keyword searches on the following websites:
Several of these sites contain texts in various translations, so I made sure to search for translated versions of my keywords, too. E.g., in addition to searching for “gold” I would also search for terms “oro”, “d’or”, etc. (It had to be “d’or” for French since “or” would yield too many search results in English texts!) Translating the search terms is less necessary for some of the sites, like The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive and Aria Database because they have English translations of many texts, so my keyword search for “gold” will still yield songs in other languages. Other sites like Opernführer might only have the libretto in the original language or in German, for example, so translating the search keywords is a definite help there.
As for search engines – some of the sites above have a very good site search feature, e.g. The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive and AllMusicals.com, so you can just go directly to their website and enter the keywords into the search form there. But sometimes a website doesn’t have a site search feature (e.g. OperaGlass), the site search feature is too specialized for a general text search (Aria Database), or the site search does not return results of sufficient quantity or quality. In this case, you can do a Google search with the following syntax in order to narrow your search results to a particular site – just include “site:” followed by the domain name of the website to search, with no space in-between:
gold site:opera.stanford.edu
Once I found song texts that fit my programming theme, I was able to track down scores for songs through online sheet music sellers, IMSLP, CPDL, or by using WorldCat to find scores in libraries local to me.
8/26/13 UPDATE 1: Fellow techie singer Katia H. has created a search tool that searches all of the websites mentioned above, in one fell swoop! It’s over at classicalsongsearch.com – check it out!
8/26/13 UPDATE 2: Glendower Jones contributed this very useful info in the comments for this post:
This is great advice. Many folks may not know of the many massive reference books on vocal repertoire that were written by Sergius Kagen, Noni Espina, Michael Pilkington, Judith Carman, Graham Johnson, Shirley Emmons and Carol Kimball. A very useful reference is Pazdirek, the BBC Song Catalogue and Classical Vocal Music in Print and of course Groves and MGG. I don’t know, but possibly some of these books may now be on Google books.
These are some of the major references but still only a drop in the bucket. Pazdirek, Universal-Handbuch der Musikliteratur was produced in Vienna from 1904-1910 and contained the compilation of practically every music publisher active at the time. This was reprinted in 1967 in the Netherlands and is now free online. Few musicians know of this amazing work. http://archive.org/details/universalhandboo01pazd
Also, in a Facebook comment, Nicholas Perna adds:
As a shameless plug, I can also recommend readers search for Britten’s entire output using The Comprehensive Britten Song Database! www.brittensongdatabase.com
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I was inspired to compile a list of streaming internet radio stations that are of interest to classical singers, after reading a thread on this topic on Facebook some weeks back. You can listen to these audio streams on your computer using your web browser; on mobile devices, you can use an app like TuneIn to access most (not all) of these audio streams. For some channels, e.g. Operavore, the player on their website provides more real-time information about the work, performers, and composer than you get through an app like TuneIn. Other channels do display that information within the TuneIn interface.
If you have suggestions for streaming audio channels that belong in this list, let me know in the comments section.
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VivaLaVoce (WETA, Washington DC) Description from their website: “VivaLaVoce presents classical vocal music in all its forms, from the Middle Ages to the present, 24 hours per day. Featuring Opera, Choral Music, and Art Song, the station offers something for everyone who loves vocal classical music.” |
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Operavore (WQXR, New York City) Click on the “Operavore” tab at the top of their website to listen to the streaming audio. Description from their website: “Operavore is WQXR’s digital 24/7 audio stream, blog and weekly radio show devoted to Opera. The Operavore blog features breaking news, expert commentary and reviews by writers Fred Plotkin, David Patrick Stearns, Marion Lignana Rosenberg and Amanda Angel. The stream features a continuous, carefully programmed mix of classic and contemporary opera recordings. The show, which launches Jan. 19, 2013, features opera news bulletins from the around the globe, previews of new recordings, and interviews with the players and personalities on the scene.” |
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MPR Choral Stream (Minnesota Public Radio) Listen from your web browser, TuneIn, or the MPR Radio App for iPhone. Description from their website: “We’ve created our 24/7 choral stream for one reason: we love this music. We want to share our favorites and some beautiful surprises with you. What’ll you hear? A big range from Palestrina to Pärt, spirituals to Schubert, and new work by Whitacre, Lauridsen, Paulus, and more wonderful contemporaries. You’ll discover great professional choirs, college choirs, amateur choirs, church choirs… anytime you want!” |
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Rádio Ópera (São Paulo, Brazil) Description from their website: “Full-length operas 24 hours a day.” |
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King FM Opera Channel (Seattle, WA) Description from their website: “All Opera, all the time – only a mouseclick away! Featuring operas 24/7, hosted by Seattle Opera General Director Speight Jenkins.” |
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King FM Choral Music Channel (Seattle, WA) Description from their website: “Choral Channel in partnership with Chorus America” |
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NDR Kultur – Belcanto (NDR, Hamburg, Germany) Listen to this stream at ndrkulturbelcanto.rad.io. Description from their website: “NDR Kultur presents the most famous arias from the world of Italian opera. The stars of the international opera stage for an hour draw the listener into the realm of dreams and the ‘dolce vita’.” |
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Swissradio.ch Opera (Switzerland) Description from their website: “Opera and Operetta: Enjoy with swissradio Opera legendary and rare opera recordings in full length.” |
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GotRadio – Classical Voices Description from their website: “Opera and choral music” |
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1.FM – Otto’s Opera House Description from their website: “Listen to over 1000 complete and uninterrupted operas from the baroque era to modern days [sic] performances. You will be dazzled by the greatest singers and composers. A great collection of operatic music!” |
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Diveky Radio – Opera (Budapest, Hungary) Description from their website: “The premier opera recordings from Hungary and around the world” |
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Diveky Radio – Operetta (Budapest, Hungary) Description from their website: “Famous operettas from Budapest and Vienna, augmented by well known French and English works” |
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Radio Caprice (Russia) Their channels include Opera, Mass/Chorus/Cantata, and even a station devoted to popera, if that’s your cup of tea. The TuneIn app was the most straightforward way for me to listen to these channels, since the web page required browser plug-ins that I was unsuccessful in installing. If you do use the TuneIn app, you’ll need to search on the exact title of the channel in order to find it, due to the large number of Radio Caprice channels, so search for “Radio Caprice Opera” or “Radio Caprice Mass/Chorus/Cantata”. Speaking of which, the Radio Caprice website lists a huge number of musical genres for which they have channels, 2/3rds of which I have no idea what they are (what is “funeral doom metal”?). |
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I got wind of the Russian Art Song website via the Diction Police Facebook Page and the Your Accompanist Twitter feed (thanks, you two!). The site is by Dr. Anton Belov, a baritone who hails from Russia. Resources include (from the description on the home page):
- IPA transcriptions and word for word translations
- Song lyrics read by a native speaker
- Multimedia online diction manuals
- Vintage common domain sound recordings (how to access audio files)
- Scores (for reference only)
- Biographical information
Also check their About page for links to other websites related to Russian opera and song.
One especially outstanding resource on the site is A Guide to Russian Diction, a 67-page book available as a free PDF download.
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Last Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting for coffee with Dan Molkentin, co-founder and co-artistic director of SingersBabel, the subscription-based website with lyric diction resources. He happened to be in town for the Music Library Association conference, so we took the opportunity to get together and talk shop. I knew at once that he was a kindred spirit when our conversation ranged from web technology stacks, media workflows, and website project management, to textual discrepancies in different composers’ setting of the same poems, Italianate vs. German Latin, and whether we should be rolling or vanishing our final R’s in German.
One piece of SingersBabel news that Dan shared was that they will be introducing Russian resources to the website in coming weeks. The resources will include multimedia guides for learning the basic sounds of the language, as well as guides for specific texts and repertoire. Speaking of repertoire, Dan tells me that the repertoire guides on the site will focus on choral works and oratorio, with a bit of art song to boot. (Although I REALLLLY hope – pretty please – that they’ll consider bringing some opera people on board to produce diction resources for the operatic repertoire and Italian. There’s an untapped market there, and even if they just did the arias from those ubiquitous Larsen anthologies, I bet they’d get business from a bunch of vocal performance majors and the like.)
We also talked about the recent SingersBabel website testing program, which I participated in. One thing that I discovered in the course of testing is that the website has many more resources than I thought; it’s just that they’re hard to find (and the SingersBabel team is working to rectify that). A sampling of notable resources:
Dan shared some other online music resources with me as well. One of them, Peachnote, is something I’ve been meaning to check out for a while. From what I’ve gathered, Peachnote is a provider of a number of interesting music technologies, but one that particularly attracted Dan’s interest was Peachnote’s platform for collaborative online multimedia annotation of music scores. In plain English, that means that you can use Peachnote’s score viewer to annotate the score with your own text, audio, or video notes and also view annotations that others have added. Here’s a screen capture of Peachnote’s score viewer with annotations:
Peachnote also makes it possible to embed the score viewer in your own website, and in fact the viewer is already in use over at IMSLP with a number of scores. For example, you can go to the IMSLP page for Le nozze di Figaro, navigate to the full score for the overture, and click the “View” button:
The Peachnote viewer then displays the score, which someone has annotated with a YouTube video recording of a performance of the overture:
Dan also tipped me off to the Sparks and Wiry Cries blog and e-zine about art song. (I can’t believe I’ve never stumbled upon this.) From their masthead: “Our mission is to provide a virtual home for the art song community: performers, students, scholars and fans. We endeavor to provoke thoughtful discussion about the extraordinary art of song.” One of their contributors is Emily Ezust, creator and maintainer of The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive, and they have a number of other notable contributors as well.
Lastly, Dan mentioned Medici TV, a French website which offers free live broadcasting of concerts, operas, and ballets along with video on demand from their catalog of concerts and classical music documentaries.
Thank you, Dan, for our engaging and enlightening conversation, and best of luck with the SingersBabel venture!
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SingersBabel is a website with learning tools for both general lyric diction study as well as for specific works in the vocal repertoire. They are looking for tech-savvy or tech-curious singers/teachers/coaches/conductors to use their website and give them feedback as they prepare to do a major revamp of their site. They are offering free six-month subscriptions to volunteer website testers – here are the details from Dan Molkentin, one of the site’s founders:
[We are interested in] having some musicians that follow your blog test the site. 20-25 people who would be willing to use [SingersBabel] for at least 15-20 minutes a week, speak with us for 5 minutes a week for one month, and complete a survey at the end of the four weeks. There are some more details we’d discuss before doing this but the participants would receive 6 months free access to the full site in exchange for their time and feedback.
We’ll be ready to have people start testing and meeting with us starting on February 1st. I’m not sure how feasible or open your users would be to this, but it would be very useful if they could use a free screen recording like BB Flashback to record their time on [SingersBabel]. This would allow us to see better how people are using the site.
If you’d like to sign up, contact Dan at daniel(at)singersbabel.com.
I’ll be participating as a tester, too. I’ve been wanting to do a review of SingersBabel here on the blog; I just haven’t had the opportunity to sit down and give the site a thorough test drive. So I’m looking forward to it.
Just to give you a taste of what’s currently available at SingersBabel, here are some screen captures from their site. The spoken text recordings are done by native speakers who are credited here.
Multimedia pronunciation guides at SingersBabel lyric diction website
Text, IPA transcription, and translation at SingersBabel website
You can follow SingersBabel on Facebook and Twitter too.
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Classical Vocal Reprints, the long-time mail-order purveyor of sheet music for vocalists, has expanded into the realm of digital sheet music with the launch of their new website for PDF sheet music downloads. This is great news for us singers because it puts their huge catalog of high-quality editions of opera, song, oratorio, and other solo vocal literature instantly at our fingertips. From their website:
We have it all (opera, art songs, specialty numbers, new composers, rare music and old favorites) […] We even carry things that are otherwise out-of-print. As our name implies, we have many hard-to-find titles which we reprint ourselves.
You can browse the composer list at their PDF download store, or search by title, composer, or catalog number.
Some of features of CVR’s catalog and service that deserve special mention:
I’m trying to convince CVR to sell their PDF sheet music in forScore’s in-app sheet music store, too. That would be super convienient for us forScore users. If you’d like to see that happen, drop CVR a line on Facebook or Twitter.
If you are not familiar with CVR, they are an independent sheet music retailer founded in 1987 and based out of Fayetteville, Arkansas. The owner is Glendower Jones, who is himself a singer and knows all the ins and outs of vocal literature, score editions, and music publishing companies. Glendower is like the concierge of classical vocal music – he’s the guy who picks up the phone when you call CVR, and he is knowledgeable and happy to advise on score editions, provide custom PDFs or other custom services, and track down and help you get your hands on any possible score you can think of (and CVR also has a retail website for traditional printed sheet music, for items that are only in that format). Even if a item is not listed on CVR’s website, just call or email Glendower and he can definitely hook you up. Glendower has supplied sheet music to such luminaries as Joyce DiDonato, Martin Katz, Susan Graham, and Thomas Hampson, but I can attest that he provides fabulous personal service to us mere mortals, too. He’s advised me about art song editions and publishers, given me discounts and free/reduced shipping charges from time to time, and once offered to send me a Bärenreiter edition at no extra charge when the score I originally requested was on backorder. I’m quite happy doing business with CVR.
A special plea: Please consider patronizing CVR for your sheet music needs (digital AND printed) and not just the “big-box” online sheet music retailers. The prices are competitive, and for you choristers, CVR’s printed music division carries choral/oratorio scores too. The PDF download store is not just CVR’s latest venture, it is also Glendower’s bid to keep his business afloat in a difficult economy and a changing music retail market environment. Except for those who have been living under a rock, musicians everywhere know that independent sheet music retailers, especially brick-and-mortar stores, have been downsizing or flat out folding left and right, and if CVR goes, it will be a huge blow to the classical vocal community. CVR is one of the last bastions of personal service in the sheet music retail world. Glendower has been known to look up a specific measure on a specific page of a specific score to provide information to a customer to help them make the right purchase. Good luck getting that kind of service from S**** M**** P***. If you’d like to see that kind of personal service and selection thrive in the 21st century, please support independent businesses like CVR.
Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Now that my music performance commitments for the holidays and the fall are behind me, I’m coming up for air and for a report on how things went from a technology perspective:
1. Regular choir rehearsals & concerts
The process used by our de facto e-music librarian for scanning and distributing PDF scores has really become quite smooth and streamlined (thanks, Steve!!). You can read about his scanning workflow in his guest post on my blog. He makes the scores available for download on a private website in two formats: as a forScore .4sc file for iPad users in the choir (since we are all using forScore) and as a PDF file for non-iPad tablet users. In the forScore version of the file, Steve packages the scores into a forScore setlist and adds metadata (mainly title and composer) and links (for handling repeats, D.S./D.C. etc.) before he sends them out. This is a huge boon to us tablet users – our music is already organized when we import it into forScore, and when sight-reading, it only takes us one tap to navigate to the right spot in the score while everyone else is madly flipping paper pages and hunting for the repeat sign or the second ending (I especially love this perk). I did learn, however, that I personally prefer to keep the printed page numbers in the PDF score rather than cropping them out with the margins to make the music notation display bigger and more readable. (Ask me in 20 years if I feel the same.)
I was astonished to learn that 20% of our choir has adopted tablets for reading and performing music. It helps that we are in Silicon Valley, and it also helps that Steve has been a low-key evangelist of sorts and has made the onboarding process very easy. I like to think that my forScore tutorial series, which I have shared with fellow choristers, has also helped.
Our conductor owns an iPad, but so far he has not conducted from it yet. I don’t blame him – when you need a musical “roadmap”, it’s not so great when you can only see one shrunken page at a time, and it’s even worse if you need to read anything more complicated than a simple vocal score with piano. A larger-format iPad would help, or even (if you can afford it) two iPads showing two adjacent pages of the score, but with synchronized page turns (the unrealBook music reader app supports this scenario – wow!).
The iRecorder app for iPad came in handy during one choir rehearsal when we had to learn a traditional African song by ear. I used my iPad to record a live performance of the song by our guest artists who came to rehearse with us, and then I uploaded and shared the recording with fellow choir members for later review.
2. Working on art songs & arias in voice lessons and coachings
One of my big projects this fall was to get Claude Debussy’s song cycle, Ariettes oubliées, under my belt in its entirety (it’s still in rough form, as my coach will attest). I bring my iPad with my music on it to lessons and coachings (and a normal binder with paper copies for my pianist, of course). Despite my complaints in a previous post, I’m facile enough with annotating music on my iPad that I can keep up with the notes I’m being given during a coaching or lesson. Sometimes I’ll go back through the score later and make things more legible by replacing my messy stylus scrawl with forScore stamp markings.
I prepared my own translations and diction notes, getting the source text from The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive, looking up word translations and IPA on the French-English dictionary at WordReference.com (they have many other languages too), and referencing information from one of my diction textbooks that I scanned and transferred to my iPad. I put this information into a Word document which I then added to my Dropbox folder. From there, I can access it anytime from either my iPad or my Android phone for study. I usually also convert the document into a PDF so I can import it into my forScore library together with the actual score. What I’d really like to do is to be able to edit the Word document on my iPad with automatic Dropbox sync so I can work on translations, etc. on the go, but my current Office suite editor app, Quickoffice, isn’t up to the task yet. When I edit my .docx Word file in Quickoffice and sync it to Dropbox, the document sometimes gets temporarily corrupted and become unreadable in Quickoffice. Fortunately, opening and saving the document on my laptop fixes it. I really really hope Quickoffice fixes this issue, but for now I only edit my document on my laptop and use my iPad and phone just for reading it without editing. Finally, I write my translation into the score using forScore’s text annotation feature:
I went to the university music library and used my iPad camera, makeshift scanning stand, and Scanner Pro app to scan the chapter on Ariettes oubliées from Pierre Bernac’s book, The Interpretation of French Song. (Side note: When using my iPad scanning setup, it’s a lot faster and easier to scan multiple pages from a smaller book like this, versus the big, bulky Castel libretto books.) It was really handy to have the book pages with me on my iPad at coachings. I checked to see if the Bernac is available as an e-book, but no dice – if I want to have the whole enchilada on my iPad, I’ll need to buy a physical book and then scan it myself. The Bernac also suggests metronome markings for the various songs, and Chris R. from Technology in Music Education reminded me that forScore’s virtual metronome will remember settings for individual songs or forScore bookmarks, so I’ll have to try plugging Bernac’s suggested tempi into forScore as a way to remind myself of the approximate tempo.
I also bought and listened to multiple recordings of songs from Ariettes oubliées on iTunes on my iPad. I used forScore’s feature for assigning song tracks to scores, which lets me listen to the track while reading the score. I wish forScore had a way of assigning multiple songs or a playlist to the same score. That would make it easier for me to do comparative listening of different artists performing the same song. Also, I purchased piano accompaniment tracks for Ariettes oubliées from Your Accompanist and mp3accompanist.com for practicing when there’s no pianist available. As for basic learning & note-bashing of the vocal line–my iPad, forScore’s virtual piano, and a pair of headphones let me do that anywhere, and it’s been useful for turning my occasional train commute into productive music-learning time.
I’ve also been using forScore setlists as virtual binders for lessons and coachings – I can quickly swap pieces of music in and out depending on what I want to work on during a particular session. (I set up “virtual binders” for a lot of other things too – audition rep, concert/recital programs, new musical projects that I’m working on, etc.)
And speaking of teaching studios, those of you who have one might like to check out the online service, Music Teacher’s Helper (description on their website: “Designed by music teachers, for music teachers, to help you manage the business aspects of running a private music teaching studio”). I recently scheduled a lesson with a teacher who uses it, and it sent me a helpful little automated reminder email before my lesson. It also does other useful administrative tasks, and I’ve heard other teachers recommend it.
(I have more to share, but it’s time to call it a night…to be continued in part 2…)
I’ve been working on some song & aria translations lately and have needed to check the pronunciation for various words. I own a modest collection of printed dictionaries with IPA at home, but was curious about whether this information is available online. Here’s a roundup of online dictionaries I found that use IPA:
Italian
French
German
Russian
Czech
English
Note, of course, that the dictionaries above don’t take into account all of the rules of lyric diction (e.g. avoiding uvular R), but they do come in handy when checking things like open vs. closed vowels. Also, with noted exceptions, the dictionaries listed have audio pronunciation examples for selected words.
Another FYI: WordReference.com has iOS/Android apps, but the IPA (for selected languages) is only on the full website, not the apps. I’d like to do a survey of online/offline dictionary apps with IPA in a future blog post – if you’re aware of any, please let me know.
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Credit: Amazon.com
MP3 accompaniment tracks are a really handy thing to have loaded up on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. They are useful as a mobile practice aid when you’re away from your pianist, especially in conjunction with a music score reading app like forScore or unrealBook that lets you link an audio track to a score for easy playback during study. MP3 accompaniment tracks will even do in a pinch for performance situations where live accompaniment is not an option (but see the note below about performance licenses).
Many of the websites that sell accompaniment tracks have audio samples so you can judge the quality of the sound and the pianist. They may also sell spoken-text diction audio tracks in which a coach or native speaker runs through the pronunciation of the aria or song text. In fact, some sites offer whole packages of learning tracks for full opera roles that include diction tracks and accompaniment tracks with and without the vocal line and vocal/orchestral cues.
If you want to use your MP3 track for live performance or on YouTube or other recordings, you will probably be required to get a license. Some of the websites make this very easy – you can add a license to your shopping cart the same way you add an MP3 track you’re purchasing.
Here are some websites that offer accompaniment tracks:
MP3 Accompaniment Tracks
Your Accompanist – MP3 piano accompaniment tracks of songs and arias, with or without the vocal line. In addition to their broad catalog, they handle custom requests. (I’ve purchased tracks and custom orders from them with good results.)
MP3Accompanist.com – MP3 piano accompaniment tracks of songs and arias. Some tracks are available in different tempi or different keys. They have a sizable catalog and also accept custom requests. In addition, they offer spoken text tracks for selected songs and arias. (I’ve had a decent experience purchasing from them as well.)
Opera Karaoke – MP3 piano accompaniment tracks for arias, vocal line tracks, and diction tracks. They also sell video tracks that display the aria text as the music plays. The video tracks are supposed to be compatible with iPhones and Android in addition to Windows/Mac/Linux. They accept custom requests. Also, they provide a useful tutorial on using Audacity to change the pitch and or tempo of an MP3 accompaniment track (this method works on any MP3 track, not just theirs).
Karaoke Opera – MP3 orchestral accompaniment tracks (using a real orchestra) for greatest-hits arias and duets from opera, Gilbert & Sullivan, Messiah/oratorio, and Broadway. Available from Amazon and iTunes.
CANTOLOPERA – Orchestral accompaniment tracks (using a real orchestra) for greatest-hits arias and a couple of full operas, plus some Italian songs. They sell the tracks on CD (which you can probably rip) but also as MP3 albums and individual MP3 tracks on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play Store.
Opera Practice Perfect – MP3 and CD piano accompaniment tracks of roles, complete operas, and accompagnato recits. They also have a couple of the major concert works, e.g. Messiah and Verdi Requiem.
Pocket Coach – MP3 piano and orchestral accompaniment tracks, diction tracks, scores, and libretto/translation booklets. Repertoire is pretty diverse and includes opera, oratorio/concert works, art song, religious solo, vocal method books/student repertoire, songs for children, and Gilbert & Sullivan. Many languages are represented, including Czech and Spanish. They have a separate storefront for MP3 downloads.
I sometimes run into random one-off collections of MP3 accompaniment tracks, for example this Schubert: Lieder without Singer album on Amazon.
Accompaniment CDs
(You can probably rip these to MP3 for use on your mobile device)
Coach Me – CDs with piano accompaniment tracks for full roles (with and without vocal line) plus spoken-text tracks by native speakers and a libretto/translation booklet. They also have assorted lieder and some major concert works, e.g. Messiah, St. Matthew Passion, Mozart/Verdi Requiems.
Music Minus One – Piano and orchestral accompaniment tracks for arias, songs, and other styles (e.g. Broadway) on CD.
Classical Karaoke – An umbrella site that showcases accompaniment CDs from different publishers. One nice thing about this site is that you can browse by album, composer, opera, role, or aria.
Aria and song anthology books often have corresponding accompaniment CDs, for example the art song anthologies from Hal Leonard.
MIDI Tracks
Classical MIDI with Words – A modest selection of free MIDI tracks for arias and songs. The sounds are a bit cheesy, but hey, it’s free.
Classical Archives: MIDI – Large collection of classical MIDI tracks, and not just for vocalists. This is a pay site and I’m not sure if it’s subscription-based or pay-by-the-track. They do have a free trial period and they may also offer a free download or two of your choosing.
Many thanks to Jeffrey Snider who started the thread on the New Forum for Classical Singers that helped me to write this post.
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Technology for the Classical Singer 