What is in this archive
The archive holds 418 sheets across 991 pages in five collections: classical guitar literature, German song sheets, international songs, studies, and a collection of well-known pieces. Everything is a PDF, everything is public domain, and everything is typeset rather than scanned — which means even note heads, clean beams and accidentals you can still read after printing on A4. Scanned nineteenth-century reprints are easy to find for free; nobody enjoys playing from a 150-dpi scan with the reverse side showing through.
Public domain here means the composer has been dead for more than seventy years. The latest composer in this archive is Francisco Tárrega, who died in 1909. Every sheet is therefore free to use — in lessons, in a choir, in a classroom, in a service, including photocopies for a whole group. That is not a footnote: a class set copied from a current method book is a copyright infringement, a class set from this collection is not.
Each category page can be filtered by initial letter and by composer. Every sheet shows its page count and file size before you open it, which matters when you are standing at a music stand with a tablet and do not want to load the 102-page complete volume by accident.
How a collection like this is made
The sheets are engraved with LilyPond, a typesetting system that produces notation from a text description much as LaTeX produces book pages. The advantage over graphical programs shows up in exactly this kind of collection: when a hundred songs need the same rule for bar spacing, lyric hyphenation and chord-symbol placement, you change one stylesheet line instead of a hundred files.
Every song therefore exists twice: as a single sheet and as part of a complete volume. Alongside the hundred single sheets, the German collection contains the complete songbook on 102 pages — the same pieces in one document with continuous pagination. Print single sheets for a rehearsal, print the volume for the choir folder.
Display titles follow a fixed pattern: work title, hyphen, composer with dates. Where no composer is given, the melody is a traditional tune with no secure attribution — this applies to 75 of the 101 German songs, which is historically accurate rather than a gap in the data. Filenames are deliberately plain ASCII, because unpackers on web servers regularly destroy accented characters in filenames; the displayed title carries the correct spelling.
Which collection for which purpose
If you play guitar and want to grow out of tablature, start with the guitar sheets. The thirty short Horetzky pieces are built for it: one page, one position, one problem. If you are at the piano looking for a well-known piece you can actually finish, go to the collection — Bach’s Minuet in G, Satie’s first Gymnopédie and Grieg’s Albumblatt sit there next to the heavyweights.
For teaching children, the German song sheets are the densest material, and they work even where the language does not: melody, lyrics and chord symbols on one page mean one child sings, a second plays the tune on a glockenspiel and a third accompanies with three chords — all from the same page. For voice lessons and choir, the international collection is the one to open, with twenty-five Schubert songs at its core.
The studies are not repertoire, they are tools. A Czerny eight-bar exercise is learned in ten minutes and used up in ten days — that is exactly the intention. Treating studies like concert pieces and polishing them for weeks wastes time; treating them as a daily quota gets you somewhere fast.
Printing, page turns and filing
The sheets are set for A4 portrait with margins that survive a ring binder. In the print dialogue choose “Actual size” or “100 %”, not “Fit to page” — otherwise note heads shrink by roughly six per cent and the systems move closer together, which is noticeable when sight-reading. US Letter works as well; the slightly shorter page simply leaves a wider bottom margin.
On a tablet the rule of thumb is that an A4 page of music is readable from about ten inches of screen diagonal. Below that you have to zoom, and you lose sight of the system. On two-page pieces the page turn is the real obstacle, which is why most sheets in this collection are set on a single page even where that forces wider spacing than strictly necessary.
If you teach regularly, keep five binders, one per collection, sorted alphabetically by work title — the same order the listings use here. Then finding a piece during a lesson takes five seconds, and that is the difference between “let’s try it now” and “I’ll dig it out for next week”.