In 2004, my wife started singing with a renaissance choir in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The choir director at that time was an elderly gentleman, who had directed the choir for nigh upon forty years, who researched the music he wanted the choir to perform and wrote out all the music by hand. As we discovered after he passed away and my wife and I went over to retrieve music from his house, he started out by writing all his music by hand; each copy was hand written. He later graduated to mimeograph copies of his music; we made sure to grab a couple copies of the tell-tale blue-ink sheets of mimeographed music for framing purposes. By the time my wife was singing with the choir, however, he had moved on to photocopied sheets of music. But these were photocopied sheets of his hand-written music.
As time went by, his music writing skills began to lessen. Some note were hard to read, some were poorly spaced, and in some cases the photocopier was just not able to handle the smudges, resulting in unreadable copies. These pieces were handed over to me to typeset so that the choir could more easily read the music. Several of these pieces are available on the internet at sites like the Choral Public Domain Library (cpdl.org), but not set as the director had set them. Other pieces just aren’t available anywhere else online.
I believe that all the music presented here is either in the public domain or is something that I have permission to post. Most of it is from the Renaissance era of music, so the only thing that can be copyrighted is the actual setting (not the music itself), and since this is my typesetting, I have granted the appropriate permissions for copying and performance. There are a few Christmas carols in here, as well as a Classical piece by Haydn and one by my wife (written for the occasion of the director’s eighty-fifth birthday, and done in Renaissance style).