First off, a huge shout out and thank you to all folks who have supported this project so far: Abi, Tracy, Sarah, Jocelyn, Lydia, Mary, Andre, Elisa, Les, Dana, and Garth! ๐
We're currently at almost $4,100 in pledges, which is almost 1/5 of the way to the project's $25,000 budget. I am so incredibly touched by and grateful for the outpouring of support for this project! I truly cannot say thank you enough!
Right now, I'm in the research phase for the project. The Institute for Puerto Rican Culture has a music library located in San Juan, PR, but there aren't any digitized scores at present. If you want to do research, you need to be on location.
Thankfully, what they do have is a database of all of the pieces in their collection that can be downloaded as a Spreadsheet. So, my task is to narrow down the dataset as much as I can so that I can be very targeted with my time when I go to visit the Institute.
The original dataset includes over 10,000 pieces of music- which ranges from everything to pieces for orchestra to operas to religious music to songs for voice and piano.
Narrowing it down to just pieces for voice and piano, and removing the songs by composers who are obviously not Puerto Rican (like Mozart or Chopin), brought the dataset down to about 4,800.
Now I'm on to the task of researching the composers I don't know, to determine whether they are Puerto Rican. If they are, they stay in the dataset; if not, I take them out, since the focus of this album will be songs by composers of Puerto Rican descent.
For now, I've gone through the letters A through G, and the dataset is now down to around 3,800, so I'm making progress!
Hopefully by next month, I'll have made it all the way through!
In the meantime, thank you for your support of the project and feel free to send any questions my way!
M๐