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It seems to me that music for which a written score exists is open source by definition, the score being the "source code" for the music.

That's what you'd think, but it's not. If you go look at the composer's original manuscript, it's a bit of a mess. Courts have decided that the process of interpreting it and cleaning it up for typesetting and publication is creative enough to warrant its own copyright. As a result, pretty much any printed music since the early 1900s on is still under copyright. Music publishers pull many of the same tricks you hear about in printed books - a font with a quirk, an occasional typo or flourish added to fingerprint that particular score as theirs, and which if duplicated exactly can be used to prove it was copied.

IMSLP has a huge repository of sheet music which has gone out of copyright and is thus freely distributable. What's really needed is OCR software for sheet music which can then convert those public domain scores to an electronic format, then do a diff with various sources to remove stuff added by the publishers and reverse-engineer what was written by the original composer. Then you'd have something equivalent to "source code" for the music.

I have even seen mac and linux users, who generally have a far superior pdf viewer installed by default, using acrobat... Never understood why.

Well, I ran across a reason a few weeks ago. I have a Macbook Pro, and I'd been using the builtin Preview program to display PDFs, as well as the Safari browser which does the job in its own windows. Then, a few weeks ago, I downloaded a PDF file from IMSLP, and both Preview and Safari showed a lot of the pages as illegible smudges. I tried it in xpdf on my nearby Ubuntu box, and had the same problem there (though a few of the problematic pages did display legibly.

Just for fun, I decided to finally download Acrobat and see how it screwed up the file. It didn't screw up at all. Amazing! All the pages that Preview and Safari showed as smudges are quite readable. In fact, it's still sitting there, with a half-buried page 103 partly visible at the upper right of my screen.

Now, I do have to admit that Acrobat is a royal PITA. For example, about an hour after I first fired it up, whenever I clicked on its window, the menu bar at the top of the screen disappeared. It took an unbelievable amount of googling to find more than just questions about this, but after wasting the time over several weeks, I finally stumbled across a mention of the magic key combo (CMD-Shift-M) that turns the menu bar on and off. Maybe I'd accidentally fat-fingered that one time; maybe it came from some hidden default; I'll probably never know.

I won't go into all the other hassles, and I don't intend to use Acrobat much. But for this one file, whatever the problems are, Acrobat does at least make its contents readable. So I'll probably keep it around for when Preview and Safari screw up on some other file. I've seen a few other files that show one or two pages that are smudges, but I've found those pages elsewhere in a different format. This time, the smudged pages (or the whole file) doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, and Acrobat is the only thing I know that displays it in its entirety.

(Well, except for the pages where it just displays a message saying that the page is missing from the museum's hard copy. But I'm pretty sure that's not Adobe's fault. ;-)

there's a similar issue actually with sheet music--most of the good sheet music for those same pieces is under some degree of copyright control. i wonder if anyone's looking at doing the same thing there? you could transcribe whole swaths of the canon to MusicXML or ABC and release them under CC-SA or GFDL pretty cheaply, i'd think.

There is a very large collection of scans of existing pieces at the International Music Score Library Project. The Mutopia Project has a relatively small collection of scores, but theirs are typeset using Lilypond with source freely available.

Also copyright law is only 50 years, so IMSLP has numerous scores that are only legally download-able in Canada.

The best thing RMS ever did (IMO) was help them not get shut down by big publishers of scores - in fact, rental prices are significantly down in the past few years, and I believe mostly because of them.

The Goldberg Variations is of course PD. The International Music Scores Project/Petrucci Music Library has half a dozen versions freely available at http://imslp.org/wiki/Goldberg-Variationen,_BWV_988_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)

I stand corrected, again! Someone please mod this gentleman up as informative, for I cannot, for obvious reasons.

The Goldberg Variations is of course PD. The International Music Scores Project/Petrucci Music Library has half a dozen versions freely available at http://imslp.org/wiki/Goldberg-Variationen,_BWV_988_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)

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).

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.

There are several copyright-free scores at IMLSP (direct link).

'Yep, who needs an MP3 player, just cart around a 3 ring binder full of sheet music. Fun for the whole family!'

Don't be silly, you just download http://imslp.org/ to your iPad and sit on the train, nodding thoughtfully to yourself while humming the viola part. This also ensures that the seat next to you will be free, giving you more space to stretch out.

Have you tried The International Music Score Library project? http://imslp.org/ A friend of mine suggested it, it looks like you can search by instrument... -D

The best solution for individuals wanting to learn new music, inefficient in the short term but invaluable in the long run, is to learn how to play by ear and transcribe the music yourself. But I'm sure you've heard that before. Anyway here are some sheet music sites I know of, primarily piano.

• PianoSheets.org Torrent site. Registrations are closed, but says you can go to their IRC channel to apply.
• Piano Files Digital sheet music trading site. List your collection, then e-mail others to request sheets from their list to trade for.
• GamingForce Video Game forum, but also has a broad range of sheet music. Have to register to see the forum; once you do, it's under concert hall > musician's library.

In case anyone does not already know, IMSLP is a great site for public domain sheet music.

Hopefully whatever comes of this will help out groups like IMSLP that are working on books and other media outside the text-centric Google mold. Orphaned copyright, and excessive copyright terms in general, are too large a problem to let an almost "good enough" solution like Google Books carry the day.

Someone should point these schools to sites like mutopia, imslp, and for choirs, the choir public domain library.

True, there is a lot of public domain music out there. There is even an international project dedicated to finding public domain scores and publishing them on the web.

However, music tastes are very generational. I can take a public domain tune, write a modern arrangement, and copyright that. Or, I can take a public domain text and write a new tune, and copyright that. This happens all the time, and it's a good thing -- it keeps the great music alive from generation to generation.

But, anything rewritten or rearranged since 1920 involves a copyright search. And, since anything put into a "fixed form" is automatically under copyright protection, anything any musician creates also involves a search and permission. It's a TON of work.

Too bad they didn't offer database dumps or other convenient means for mirrors to obtain the content.

IMSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project. It used to be a great wiki where a lot of public-domain musical scores could be accessed, including many orchestral scores, before Universal Edition issued a couple cease-and-desist letters.

Congratulations to the Project Gutenberg! My community orchestra will be donating to them soon.

You also have to be careful about what sheet music you are using. There are projects that distribute properly free sheet music:
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Sheet_ Music_Project
http://www.cpdl.org/
http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://icking-music-archive.org/

http://www.imslp.org/ is a site that contains actual public domain editions of many of these same scores. It has more mozart than mutopia but less than this site. Check it out!

The largest collection of sheet music I have seen on the Internet is the Werner Icking Music Archive, at http://icking-music-archive.org/. http://imslp.org/ also has a decent collection, as well as Mutopia, which has been previously linked.