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Mutopia: Where Music is Free
rabalde writes "Check the Mutopia project. In the same spirit of the beloved Project Gütenberg,
but consists of a growing collection of free music.
The essence of Mutopia is that of a growing number of musical scores all typeset using GNU Lilypond by volunteers. All the music is downloadable for free as Postscript (.ps) and PDF (.pdf) files , as well as Lilypond's own LY (.ly) file format."
When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive. I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.
Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format, but they have more technical limitations.
Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to .ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.
When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.
As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Now, IANAL, but unless the people who submit scores to the site created them by looking at the composer's original scores, I assume that sooner or later some lawyer will go after them for copyright infringement.
Certain versions of scores are known as "Urtext," meaning that they are exactly what the composer wrote, to the best of anyone's knowledge. Those are the scores the contributors use for input.
If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page?
Because most of them are either recent or edited. No one said Urtext editions are neccesarily easy to come by.
(Note: you could have read about this if you had visited the page, and followed the link to "Legal Information")
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I've contributed a Bach Prelude to the project, and it was definitely a worthwile experience. I hope to contribute again sometime soon.
With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.
So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.
Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.
Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:
\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }
Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.
The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.
I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.
The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.
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both the Berne Convention and the EU directive have accepted the standard that copyright should protect the author and two succeeding generations. Based on the numerous viewpoints presented to the Committee as it has considered these issues, the Committee concludes that the majority of American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children and through them into the succeeding generation. The Committee believes that this general anticipation of familial benefit is consistent with both the role of copyrights in promoting creativity and the constitutionally based constraint that such rights be conferred for "limited times."
Among the primary justifications asserted for the adoption of the life-plus-70 term under the EU Directive was the conclusion that the life-plus-50 term is no longer sufficient to protect two generations of an author's heirs.
The Register of Copyrights informed the Committee that even for post-1978 works, which are afforded the basic life-plus-50 term of protection, the current term has proven insufficient in many cases to protect a single generation of heirs. For example, Walter Donaldson, who will forever be linked via his songs to the extraordinary success of the 1927 film "The Jazz Singer," composed many of his most famous works when he was in his twenties and died in 1947 while in his fifties. Were the current life-plus-50 term applied at that time, all of his works would fall into the public domain at the end of 1997. Nevertheless, Ellen Donaldson, the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music and in protecting his copyrights. Like the children of composers such as Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin, Richard Whiting, Hoagy Carmichael, and many others, her legitimate interest in her father's copyrights can be expected to continue for decades, and most certainly for the next 20 years.
In order to reflect more accurately Congress' intent and the expectation of America's creators that the copyright term will provide protection for the lifetime of the author and at least one generation of heirs, the bill extends copyright protection for an additional 20 years for both existing and future works.
The Committee is aware of the criticism of the proposed extension by those who suggest that it marks a step down the road of perpetual copyright protection. The Committee is unswayed by this argument for three reasons. First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works. Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author. Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
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Naturally, they had to pick the least compatible music notation format there is.
The most compatible is NIFF. It's non-proprietary, and supported by all major music notation software. The only problem is it's a binary format, but then so is PDF. A good cross-platform ASCII format would be SDML, which based on SGML and currently in ISO draft standard status.
After years of pleading with others to stick to published standards, is it too much to hope that we do the same?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It gets worse. We geeks often think we're breaking new ground with our hatred of insane copyright law and regulations, but it's been going on for years.
In Australia, performing Grand Right Works (basically anything intended to be performed on stage, such as opera, musical, revue, pantomime or choral work over 20 minutes long) requires paying money to AMCOS, no matter how long the composer has been dead. You heard it right. Performing a Bach Chorale requires paying the copright meisters even though Bach has been dead for 250 years. How can they do this? Simple: if you don't pay them money for these works that are out of copyright, you don't get the rights to copy or perform anything that is under copyright. They have you by the proverbials.
My mother is a music teacher. Music teachers need to bang their collective heads against these ridiculous regulations all the time, because one thing that music teachers do a lot of is get students to perform music, which requires obtaining performing rights, photocopying rights and so forth. She lived in almost perpetual fear of the AMCOS inspectors. At one point (she doesn't do this any more BTW), she kept her cache of photocopied music in the boot (note for Americans: trunk) of her car and only brought into the office that which was needed for that day.
Oh, and just being out of copyright doesn't necessarily help you. I don't know if you've ever read a composer's autograph, but they're often almost illegible. (I know, I edited a Bach's "Musical Offering" once. I should type it up and submit it to Mutopia.) You really need an edited and published version. But editing and publishing slaps a new copyright on that edition.
IMO, if we geeks spoke to musicians and music teachers over the insanity of copyright law, we would find a strong and vocal ally.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.
But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.
What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.
Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)
While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
From the website:
Seventy years after a composer dies, the copyright on his work expires and anyone can copy it.
Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright? Hell, what is the purpose of musical copyright in the first place?
Music, like digital information, is nothing more than a specific arrangement of a finite number of symbols. The entire concept that someone can "own" a particular grouping of symbols is at best ludicrous.