Open-Source Bach; Copyright-Free Goldbergs

rDouglass writes "An open source music notation software (MuseScore) and an award winning pianist (Kimiko Ishizaka) are raising money to create a new score and a new recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. They will release both works to the public domain (copyright-free) using the Creative Commons Zero tool. This bypasses usual copyright protections that are given to each published edition of the score and each individual recording of the piece, and addresses a gap in the availability of free (gratis/libre) versions of the work. MuseScore scores are XML based and are thus like the source code for music. They can also be embedded into websites and linked with YouTube videos, creating rich multimedia experiences. The Kickstarter project has begun recently and $4,000 has been raised."

Re:Innovate!

[chemicaldave]

Are you saying it's not innovating? Classical sheet music is very, very expensive.

Re:Innovate!

[ggramm]

It's not innovating and creating new if you take existing sheet music...

For The Uninitiated

[Anonymous Coward]

The Goldberg Variations [wikipedia.org] were made a pop classic (oxymoron?) by Glenn Gould in 1955, becoming a million seller. If you're new to Bach try The Well-Tempered Clavier [wikipedia.org]. A. Hewitt's recordings of both of the above are more recent and very good in my opinion.

Re:Why not MIDI?

[Rabbidous]

Why not midi? As a musician, I'll ask you a parallel question: Why not write all documents in flat text? Who needs bold, underline, different fonts, pagination etc?? Midi doesn't make pretty sheet music. It only notates "note on" or "note off" or "patch change." It doesn't even notate which score a note should be on. This means, for example, that piano music would be just about impossible to play from a raw midi dump. An XML based markup, or the TeX based Lilypond allow for pretty, easy to read, scores. On the other hand, Lilypond has a midi import feature, so MIDI IS useful. It just requires some editing to make it human playable.

Copyright free scores already exist...

[gnud]

While I'm certainly not opposed to the idea, both scores and recordings exists that are out of copyright. Bach is probably one of the easier composers to get hold of both scores and recordings.

There are several copyright-free scores at IMLSP (direct link) [imslp.org].

Re:Why not MIDI?

[Cornelius the Great]

MIDI is very limited. MIDI was set up 30 years ago as a communication interface, and by today's standards it's a poor one- you're limited to one note per millisecond. IIRC, you are also limited to 16 channels, so composing scores for an entire orchestra is out of the question.

To top it all off, it wasn't meant for music notation. Symbols like Accelerandos, Ritardandos are notably absent- changes to tempos are hardcoded. Many other symbols are absent as well. Sometimes notes need to be formatted in a special way (ie- for readability, or left/right hand on piano).

Anyone who has ever composed in Finale, Sibelius, etc and tried to export to midi will notice the limitations right away. Why, what's your beef with XML anyway?

Re:Copyright free scores already exist...

[AliasMarlowe]

While I'm certainly not opposed to the idea, both scores and recordings exists that are out of copyright. Bach is probably one of the easier composers to get hold of both scores and recordings.

There are several copyright-free scores at IMLSP (direct link) [imslp.org].

There are a few PD or CC versions there (among many which must be purchased). One problem is that the PD ones are mostly just bitmap scans of ancient prints, and the CC ones are PDFs. The PDFs are neater and cleaner than the scans, but neither of them is a "source" code - you cannot easily modify the score to make your own variations in tempo through a piece, for example, or add an extra instrument to augment the piece. That is probably the greatest benefit of releasing scores in XML or TeX format - the ability to easily adapt or modify them.

Re:Copyright free scores already exist...

[jewelises]

Also check out Musopen [musopen.org], a large collection of public-domain classical music recordings and sheet music. They take donations and use those donations to hire professional artists to make new recordings of the pieces and then put them into the public domain.

Re:Why not MIDI?

[Rabbidous]

Real sheet music doesn't indicate aftertouch, and a real piano can't even play aftertouch either. I realize there are more events to midi than the ones above, but I was focusing mostly on what you need to know to play a piece of music on an instrument. These are things like phrasing, dynamics, fingerings. It also involves placing notes on the score in a conventional manner so that they are quickly understandable- Whether the stem of a note points up or down, for example, depends on many things, none of which MIDI notates.

Re:For The Uninitiated

[e9th]

Just before he pulps Lt. Boyle & Sgt. Pembry in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is listening to the Goldberg Variations. The aria, if memory serves.

Re:Innovate!

[Hooya]

I'm not denying that performances are a new work. What I was trying to get at is that the music that was free can only be had via listening to copyrighted performances, or copyrighted transcriptions. So now you have a situation where music that didn't even have copyright protection at the time it was created (and if they did at that time, they certainly would have entered public domain by now) are only available via copyright.

Material that was in public domain effectively entered copyright. The exact opposite of what the copyright system is meant to facilitate.

Interesting, but...

[bleh_fu]

Contrary to TFA, there are CC licensed scores in Lilypond format available through Mutopia [mutopiaproject.org]. As far as PDF scans and such, as other posters have mentioned, there are innumerable resources [mcgill.ca].

The big questions for me (disclaimer: I'm a professional classical pianist) is that of scholarly review. The go-to publisher for Bach today is Bärenreiter/Neue Bach Ausgabe [baerenreiter.com], and by and large, any edition of Bach that I use that isn't Bärenreiter should ideally be cross referenced with it. Of course, it is very expensive to purchase, but it is one item that any university with a music program simply must have in its library. What concerns me is that TFA simply is vague who or what they mean by scholarly review, and this alone would prevent me from considering it over current alternatives.

IMHO the value in the project will be a (hopefully) excellent recording that is CC licensed, as there doesn't appear to be any decent recordings of the sort (through a cursory search), unless you include Wanda Landowska's eccentric harpsichord recordings [archive.org] from 1945. Genius is already easily available in recordings on piano by Gould [amazon.com] (both 1955 and 1981), Schiff [amazon.com], Hewitt [amazon.com], Barenboim [amazon.com], Perahia [amazon.com], and Leonhardt [amazon.com] on harpsichord.

Open music is starting to go somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's not just in composition software or performances like in the article.

There's some nice synth/digital audio workstation software too. These come fairly well packaged with their own sample kits, integrated synthesizers, LADSPA effects, and plugin support for other things like soundfonts and VST effects and instruments. I believe all of them also save music in XML as well. (Perhaps not the same exact format, but I'm sure they'd be easy enough to convert since labels appear to make sense.) XML is kind of cool, because it should be possible to integrate music into other things with scripting that can readily parse it for things like light-shows or 3D animation. (Easy to trigger events in different ways. So now its just a matter of imagination limiting how one would geek-out with music.) In a way the current FOSS music software scene it reminds me of where FOSS 3D software was about 10 years ago. Tons of potential, just needs people to get on the bandwagon so that it can further develop and match or exceed its commercial peers.

Ardour [ardour.org] for Linux and OSX. This one is supposed to be nice. (I haven't tried it yet. I'm waiting for somebody to roll out the Win32 binary.) From what I've seen, it's geared towards the professional. (Looks similar to Cubase?)

LMMS [sourceforge.net] for Linux and Windows. From my experience this one is very easy to use (similar to FL Studio, from what many have said), but has many rough edges. So as quick as it is to get going and doing some very complex things, doing some things with fine control or nuance is harder than it should be. But don't knock it, it's very powerful for what it is.

Unison Music Production Studio [sourceforge.net] for ???... They still haven't started much yet. I've heard comments that LMMS is supposed to merge with this. I'm taking the wait and see approach here.

Some examples? Sure. I think the music in these videos represents the software fairly well.
NIN remix in Ardour [youtube.com]
An original score made using LMMS. [youtube.com]

I'll also mention Audacity [sourceforge.net] even though it's not a DAW, it is a rather nice recording software and it works well for using alongside the other software here. But I'm sure everyone here already knows about this one.

So if you're a musician or perhaps just wanting to play around with music as a hobby, there's plenty of software to look into. No more excuses about not being able to afford it.