Today, December 28th, 2018, marks twenty years since the founding and first posting of a handful of scores of the Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL.org) by Rafael Ornes. CPDL provides freely downloadable music scores in the Public Domain as well as scores made available to CPDL by contemporary composers for free download.

Since CPDL was ported to its current ChoralWiki site in 2005, the number of score pages has grown to 10,000 by 1439 composers in 2009, then doubled to 20,000 score pages by about 2550 composers in 2015, and this year passed the 30,000 mark (31,149 by 3194 composers as I write). This year alone, there have been 3425 new score pages created for works previously not available at CPDL, well above the goal of 3200 which was reached on November 30th.

Some 67% of our scores are of sacred music, and 33% are of secular music.

Distribution of score pages by musical era:

  2%   Medieval music
42%   Renaissance music
12%   Baroque music
10%   Classical music
14%   Romantic music
  3%   Early 20th century music
16%   Modern music

Clearly, Renaissance music dominates our collection, while Modern music (and hence not Public Domain but generously provided by composers) leads the rest of the categories. Without the significant contributions of scores and the hard working efforts of editors and administrators at CPDL, this success would never have been possible. To these and to our many users who visit the ChoralWiki site to download scores, obtain (and provide) information, we offer heartfelt thanks for making CPDL the valuable and crucial resource for choral music that it enjoys.

Charles H. Giffen
President, Choral Public Domain Library
Manager, ChoralWiki