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BBC Offers Beethoven Symphonies for Download
Simon80 writes "BBC Radio 3 is making performances by the BBC Philharmonic of Beethoven's 6th to 9th symphonies available for free download for the next few days only, as the second part of a trial to 'test listeners appetite for downloads'. During the first part, the first 5 symphonies were offered, and over 650,000 people downloaded them."
So, where can I get the earlier performances? I assume someone might have them available for download somewhere. Thanks. :)
Does anyone have links to the first 5 (if it is even still legal to download them from anywhere)?
Anyway, this sort of thing is very cool. I have not listened to much Beethoven (aside from bits and peices in movies and such), so something like this is an excellent opportunity. If anyone knows any places to legally download performances of other classics, please post them.
I love getting free, good music from the internet. The Internet Achive's Audio section is my very good friend, as is LegalTorrents. Granted, that is completely different music from this, but still it is awesome to be able to enjoy music being made by people who love making music more than making money.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
TEST #1: Appetite for free downloads
- status: complete
result: people like free downloads.
TEST #2: Ongoing Appetite for free downloads
- status: incomplete
result: pending...
I just cant wait to see what the results are!!
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The best musicians are usually too busy trying to scrape a living to play in a recording for free. Even if some musicians are willing to play for nothing, there are many other costs involved. You have to hire the music, which includes a fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases. You have to hire a recording venue with a nice acoustic. And you have to pay someone who knows what they're doing to record it. I'm sure there are lots of classical recordings that don't recoup even these costs...
One good turn - gets all the covers.
Goddamn communist atheists at the BBC, sharing stuff. Don't they realise that if any of us stop grasping what is ours, society will collapse. You didn't see Jesus Christ preaching about sharing, did you.
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aren't there any "free classical performers" out there?
Yes. The problem is, they're not very good. Unlike popular music, where someone can start to learn guitar and become a world-famous "musician" a few years later (in some cases, this order is reversed), a good quality symphony orchestra contains 50 or more musicians, rarely with less than fifteen years of experience.
As a general rule, if you're a professional classical musician, you can't afford to give away your work for free -- not to mention the costs of renting a recording studio which can fit an entire symphony orchestra. If you're an amateur classical musician (defined as "has a full time job which isn't music"), then unless you're really exceptional, you're not good enough to make recordings which people will want to listen to.
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I've always thought that Beethoven's 9th symphony (and Beethoven generally) was incredibly overrated, just because everyone has heard of Ode to Joy. I'm no aficianado, but it seems generally all over the place and 'ding-dongy' - mindless triumphalism for the flag-waving plebs.
Listen to the whole thing. The Ninth is a heck of a lot more than just the Ode to Joy.
I agree that if you only listen to the Ode to Joy, and take it out of the context of the greater work, then it is mindless triumphalism.
For this reason I really, really hate those "best of the classics"-type mix albums with the most-well-known fragments of classical music.
They're the musical equivalent to sports videos with "Greatest goals" etc. Watching an amazing goal is fun. But it is nowhere near the same experience as watching a full game at the edge of your seat, and experienceing an amazing last-minute goal in its context.
I always thought that most countries should those days invest a non-negligeable part of their cultur budget to set up huge on-line databases. I am amazed to see the cost to maintain dusty municipal libraries while I have still no way to get all those music and novels which are in the public domain.
It is still the same tune: when will people in charge realize the power of digital information. One book in a library can be read by one person at one time. It gets wear out, it can be stolen. A book in a library can be read by what ? at most 50 person a year ? How much does it cost to be stored handled, fixed ? That's ridiculous. And municipal libraries should be the place to find computer to access those database if you do not own one.
Also, for that BBC initiative, I read:
Download disclaimer:
The BBC grants you a 7-day, non-exclusive licence to download this Beethoven Experience audio.
You may not copy, reproduce, edit, adapt, alter, republish, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use this audio in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use.
So I can't give that piece of culture to my grand'ma and my little nephew ? That sucks.
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Well it may be triumphal, but it isn't mindless triumphalism in that sort of jingoistic way you imply. Rather is is a deep expression of joy and solidarity among your fellow human beings. With out a little work you will probably miss the point of any music which falls outside the musical vernacular within which you were raised. I would suggest spending a little time with the middle piano sonatas and concertos and move on from there. Beethoven did write some mind-blowingly profound music such as the late string quartets, but you need to be able to listen from a different point of view than you generally get by default in this culture.
Here is the text of the Schiller poem used in the last movement--I think flag waving is a stretch:
Joy!
Joy, beautiful spark of God,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, fire-drunk,
Heavenly, your shrine.
Your magic reunites
That which custom has strongly split;
All humans will become brothers
[Schiller's original:
What custom's sword has parted;
Beggars become princes' brothers]
Where your soft wing whiles.
Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt
To be a friend of a friend;
Whoever has achieved a lovely wife
Mix in your joy!
Yes, also whoever only one soul
Calls his own around the world!
And whoever has never known of this,
Steal away crying out of this group!
All beings drink joy
At the breasts of nature;
All the good, all the bad
Follow her trail of roses.
She gave us kisses and vines,
A friend, proven in death;
Great pleasure was given to the worm,
And the cherub stands before God.
Glad, like his sun flies
Through heaven's splendid plan,
Run, brothers, your race,
Joyful, like a hero to the victory.
Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to all the world!
Brothers, over the starry firmament
Must live a loving father.
Do you bow down, millions?
Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him beyond the starry firmament!
He must dwell beyond the stars.
Many classical forms have become pompous, whiny and annoying to modern ears. I, for example, can't stand any Vivaldi, Haendel, Beethoven. I've enjoyed them all, mind you, when I was younger, but I've grown out of it. These days, I enjoy Mahler, Rachmaninoff, or Franck much more, and I'm getting to be really fond of Ligeti, Xenakis and all the really modern composers.
I believe music is like wine: when you start drinking some, you prefer the sweet, easy-going ones. Then as your tastebuds develop, you start getting more and more into wines that you once thought were bitter and undrinkable, and you start "understanding" them more. What I mean is, music, like wine, is an acquired taste.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
See for example Magnatune, which has tons of good classical recordings including some from world renowned performers, all under Creative Commons licenses. Granted they are mostly solo and small chamber performances, rather than full scale orchestral works. However, there are certainly professional classical performers willing and able to release stuff under CC. Note also that the BBC downloads are just a 7-day license and you're not allowed to share the files after downloading. It's not much better than a one-time radio broadcast that you can tape off the air.
The main reason for all of this: supply of classical musicians vastly exceeds demand. On the supply side, music schools, universities and conservatories worldwide are graduating thousands of performers of classical music every year. On the demand side, you can count the number of classical music professional orchestras in most countries in the low single digits; the reality is that the market for classical music concerts is much smaller than the market for popular music concerts.
However, what this means for the future of open-licensed freely downloadable recordings of classical music is less clear. There is no shortage of brilliant musicians already employed full-time in other paying jobs like music teaching who might consider getting together with others to perform classical works under some sort of open licence, like one of the Creative Commons licences . I suspect that as more people become aware of the open-licensing phenomenon in other media, more classical music performers will help create a similar bandwagon for classical music recordings.
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It's not like you were the only one to grow up. Beethoven did it, too. Did you ever listen to Beethoven's late string quartets? They're legendary and noone in their right mind could call them "pompous", "whiny" or "annoying".
Besides, Mahler is also a bit pompous (but I like his music).
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Difference: As most people know, CBR uses a constant bitrate over the whole file (e.g. 128kbits/s).
VBR works with a constant QUALITY (or badness) setting and tries to guarantee that the quality won't degrade below a certain level by letting the bitrate float up and down as necessary. The advantage is that the bitrate is perfectly used up and does not waste precious bits on plain parts (e.g. silence) of a piece of music.
The problem is that there is no real scale for quality so arbitrary numbers get assigned (for the ogg-encoder 1-10). This let's people struggle over determining which quality is ``good enough''.
Another problem is that the target size of the file is not predictable. Usually it falls within certain limits but if the encoder struggles with a complex piece of music, the output file size can deviate considerably.
ABR is a compromise between the two, It let's the bitrate float but guarantees a specified AVERAGE bitrate. Thus it is more efficient than CBR (although not as efficient as VBR because it has to establish somewhat tighter control and has to let the quality drop if it threatens to exceed the average too much) but also predictable in the size of the resulting file, though not as precisely as CBR (though the deviation is very very slim in most cases). In almost all cases ABR is preferable to CBR if VBR isn't an option.
I think a better factor was that the disc diameter had to be able to fit within 5 1/4 inch disc drive bays, and then that manufacturing technology at the time only permitted a certain spiral density.
Still having a musical heuristic to validate its use as a musical storage format is a good idea.
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> I reckon the 9th Symphony 67 minutes.
It depends on the pace set by the conductor. I have copies ranging from 59'43 to 69'34.
> Incidentally all of Beethoven's symphonies are very long.
And longer than expected at the time. Famously, during the premiere performance of the 3rd, someone in the audience shouted that he'd "give a kreutzer" for it to be done and over with.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Indeed, the 4th movement, and the 3rd are still among my all-time fave tracks, but try to get a good performance, I have a 120MB rip of the 4th movement by Bernstein, which is incredible. Cheap dime cuts are pathetic compared to a good performance (this one is the weiner phil), and just not worth it.
Been a while since I've been in a chill enough mood to sit down and enjoy them though, damn 5 second atten-hehe, i googled "boobs", hehe
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For encoding classical music, AAC is far better than the alternatives. Ogg Vorbis is close, but last time I checked had some issues with harpsichords (not sure if they're fixed now, but encoding, say, a Brandenbug Concerto would result in some quite unpleasant distortions).
If you have a license for the Dolby Pro codec, then you will find it's quality to be superb. If not, the only source of music encoded with it that I know of is iTMS. The PsyTEL AAC encoder is also very good (close to the Dolby Pro encoder, passing it in some areas), but the last time I looked it was Windows-only - although it's a command-line app so it probably runs fine with WINE.
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Thank goodness I've got some Slashdot Anonymous Coward to tell me that Beethoven is crap. We all anxiously await your Symphonic efforts.
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The music sounds great for me. Probably because I'm using a $3000 Monster cat5 cable to connect to the internet, through a JPS Labs broadband router, drawing power from an Audio Magic Clairvoyant AC Adapter.
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I don't mean to disrespect them in any way, nor am I complaining that they are overpaid; however, the starting salary for a 1st violinist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is over $100,000. There are far too many great musicians who are indeed trying to scrape a meager living, but members of prominent orchestras are not such people. Of course, as you said there are more costs than that to an recording, and it is of little surprise that there are not more distributed for free.
English is easier said than done.
The 1st Chair Violinist has a great deal of responsibility over and above being a hot violin soloist. S/He is usually the assistant conductor of the orchestra. S/He is the person who puts the orchestra through its rehearsals. S/He makes sure everyone has the right sheet music. S/He is basically the "second-in-command" of the orchestra.
;-)
All that, and they have to be a hot violin soloist too. It's really quite a set of responsibilities. No shit they get paid well.
Unfortunately the percussionists in the orchestra are the ones at the bottom of the totem pole. This was a fact of life that was quite depressing for my husband, who's a percussionist and was a member of the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble in the early part of the 1970s. Instead of classical, he took his chances on rock.
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