Alas, due to concerns over tightening copyright law, the CASA board voted to temporarily close the arrangement library in hopes that we could find a safe way to reopen it soon. That was two years agao, and at this point we don’t see a viable way to reopen it in its former form. So, we’ve decided on a multi-faceted approach to replacing it.
We’ll be reopening the arrangement library, focusing entirely on a cappella original tunes and songs in the public domain. Many of these tunes will also be in our MP3 download library, so you can hear a song and then get the arrangement.
In addition, we’re starting an “earrangement” library (as in “EAR-rangement”), which allows us to distribute arrangements of any song in the world. We won’t have corresponding sheet music for these songs, but you’ll be able to listen to your part (say, soprano 2) in the left channel, and hear the rest of the arrangement in the right. Once everyone in your group has listened enough, you can all get together and sing. One big bonus: people who can’t read music will now be able to start groups.
And there are many more ways today to get a great contemporary arrangement than there were a decade ago.
Several publishers are putting out songbooks and octavos, including Contemporary A Cappella Publishing, UNC Jazz Press, Hal Leonard, and others. Rather than track down each one, your best bet is to visit the single largest collection of contemporary a cappella at www.a-cappella.com.
If you’d like to learn by ear, CAP has some parts CDs corresponding to their songbooks, and there’s a great new company called Mach One at www.SATB.com that has started putting out 6 part mixed learning tracks of some very current songs with more to come each month.
And should you want a specific song you can’t find in any of the above locations, you can commission a custom arrangement through www.totalvocal.com (shameless plug warning: that’s my company!) or through many other arrangers.
In short, although the library is closed, between our new efforts and the increased options in the a cappella community, you should have little difficulty finding some great charts for your group.
Click on the wrench in the upper left-hand corner to see what else you can do.