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Finding Digital Scans of Sheet Music?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the why-not-we-scan-everything-else dept.

Crymson asks: "I've been trying to find a repository of sheet music out on the web. I'm mostly interested in Classical, although scores for Brass pieces would be nice. I'm sure with Google digitizing all the books of the world, someone must be digitizing all of the sheet music. I don't want special viewers, and I don't want to pay out the nose for music that *may* be what I'm looking for. Where is a decent repository of free sheet music?"

24 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Copyright is copyright by hedronist · · Score: 5, Informative

    Good luck. The copyright on sheet music is the same as for other works. If published before 1923, it's in the public domain, between 1922 and 1978, 95 years from publication date, after that, it's life of author + 70 years.

    In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

    For more authoritative info, google on "length of copyright" and "sheet music", or see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter0/0-a.html

    1. Re:Copyright is copyright by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, and it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is. Yes, that's right, the actual way the printing company formats the score and arranges it on the page is copyrightable. So what are you going to do, track down an ancient piece of parchment and scan that? No. The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score, preferably from memory, then put it under a permissive license. Just be sure to note that you're not claiming copyright over the public domain work, otherwise your copyright will be easily challenged. Putting the whole thing into the public domain might be possible.. although I suppose you could be sued for negligence if you made a mistake in your transcription.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:Copyright is copyright by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

      If published before 1923. . .

      Like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

      In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

      And in any case, he doesn't actually want scans, even if he doesn't know that. What he wants is music that has been digitally encoded in a free and open standard, so that there are readers the can interepret and print it.

      The basically means ABC and Lilypond files:

      http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/ABC-FAQ.html

      http://lilypond.org/web/

      KFG

    3. Re:Copyright is copyright by westlake · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is. Yes, that's right, the actual way the printing company formats the score and arranges it on the page is copyrightable. So what are you going to do, track down an ancient piece of parchment and scan that? No. The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score, preferably from memory, then put it under a permissive license. Just be sure to note that you're not claiming copyright over the public domain work.

      You are assuming that there have been no changes in musical notation since Bach and that there are no other significant problems in preparing a score suitable for modern performance.

      If you are listening to a performance of Bach, it is almost certainly an orchestra's unique (and copyrighted?) interpretation of the work, and not an attempt at a mechanical, note-by-note, transcription of the score in manuscript.

    4. Re:Copyright is copyright by Frodrick · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is.

      I have a fairly major credibility issue with that statement. Could you cite some sources for your assertion? - (Not including music publishers, of course)

      My understanding of copyright law is that it requires a certain amount of creativity before something is considered copyrightable. Rewriting and reformating just isn't enough. I would normally expect that public domain music would only be freshly copyrightable IF enough new work had been added to justify adding the new publisher's name to the "Composed by" line.

      There are a number of content middlemen (Music, video, sheet music) out there who are under the impression that every time they reissue the same work, copyright begins anew. They are wrong.

      Everyonce in a while, a publisher will attempt to render public domain material copyrightable by introducing a deliberate error. Then they claim that copiers have infringed their copyrights on the errors. When challenged, this, too, fails the necessary "creativity" test for copyrightability.

      "not score program, they probably copyright the output of it"

      Not possible. While the program remains copyright, of course, the copyright of the output belongs solely to the author. I have used some of these programs; they allow you to set your own copyright notices.

    5. Re:Copyright is copyright by CRCulver · · Score: 2, Informative

      Making a definitive text from a very badly scrawled manuscript is hard work. Engraving that text according to traditional techniques (which the best Bach publishers do) is immensely laborious, taking 8 hours for a single page. It's copyrightable, the same way that making out the tiny marks on papyri or vellum to give us a critical text of Plato or Petronius means that, say, the Oxford Classical Texts are copyrightable.

    6. Re:Copyright is copyright by WowTIP · · Score: 2, Informative

      Lilypond and Mutopia should keep him busy for a while...

      --

      --

      "I'm surfin the dead zone
      In the twilight, unknown"
    7. Re:Copyright is copyright by kaliphonia · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actully there are sites like iTunes for sheet music. http://www.musicnotes.com/ has been around for about 7 or 8 years now and has been working on the iTunes model since before iTunes even existed. They have over 50,000 legally available sheet music downloads avaialable - almost all popular music. If you can't find it there, you probably won't find it anywhere. Plus, you can download individual songs and are not forced to buy a full book (although if you want to buy the book, they sell those as well). Hope this clears things up.

    8. Re:Copyright is copyright by RR · · Score: 2, Informative
      it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is.
      My understanding of copyright law is that it requires a certain amount of creativity before something is considered copyrightable.

      My understanding is that a lot of music, especially older than Classical period pieces, do involve a bit of creative work. The source materials are highly fragmentary: They were written before copyright was widespread, and the most widely published (and complete) editions are buggy. Even the authors had conflicting editions, as they had to compose for what instruments were available rather than The Vision of the Reasoning Man with a paying popular audience, and they had misprints. Earlier pieces, especially, were often not written until somebody in the 19th Century decided they were worth preserving (especially folk music), or the manuscripts were considered worthless and discarded (like a lot of Bach's work), or the only copies were destroyed in some random church fire (I'm thinking Schutz).

      Any reasonably scholarly edition printed today will have an extensive story about which source manuscripts they used, how they adapted them to modern typographic conventions, what did they change because the editor thought it was a typo, where the ossia come from, and any other details. I think they're mostly found as compilations of, like, 12 Sonatas for Solo Flute from Telemann, or Organ Music by Bach including the entire Trio Sonatas and Orgelbuchlein and several more pieces.

      Any purely performance edition will have the editor, the composer of the bass realization, the composer who filled in the whatever number of measures that were lost to history or never composed (think Christopher Tolkien but worse source material), and whomever else was involved in the adaptation. Performance editions often deviate in interesting ways from scholarly editions. They're also much easier to find in stores and libraries, often adapted to instruments that the composer never saw or heard.

      The obvious solution is to find the piece that you want on paper (or practice enough to compose or improvise credibly), and if necessary adapt it to your instrument. If you read the liner notes on any reasonably scholarly performance recording, they often describe which sources they used, and how they filled in the missing pieces themselves, largely because they're experts showing off, but probably partially because they can't risk the copyrights.

      --
      Have a nice time.
  2. MusicNotes by DrDitto · · Score: 4, Informative

    www.musicnotes.com is not free, but the site is pretty slick and to my knowledge is the largest online sheet music retailer. They do have some free sheet music, and they have a browser plugin that lets you preview (and play) the music.

  3. Check Here by Who235 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This looks interesting

    I think you should be able to find something here.

    BTW, GIYF.

  4. Torrents by Conception · · Score: 2, Informative

    Though, not particularly legal, there are sheet music torrent sites out there. I don't really want to name them, obviously, but if you do some research you can find them.

  5. Mutopia by lobotomy · · Score: 5, Informative
    Try Mutopia. Quote:
    All music in the Mutopia Project is free to download, print out, perform and distribute. There are now 756 pieces of music available!
  6. Try Mutopia by brownsteve · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've found some goodies at the Mutopia Project. This website has many out-of-copyright pieces that have been typeset by volunteers and uploaded for all to use. Music is available in PDF, MIDI, and LilyPond (an open-source Finale-ish format).

  7. The Sheet Music Archive by JonLatane · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Sheet Music Archive, ugly as their site may be, has a TON of good public domain, classical music available for free download. They limit your downloads per day with a cookie, but I think a clever-minded individual like yourself could get around that (and if you're not clever, in Firefox, Tools->Options...->Privacy->Show Cookies, search for sheetmusicarchive.net and delete whatever is there). I've used them for years in my piano studies.

  8. Sheet music sites by fiferjim · · Score: 2, Informative

    I use a few sites for sheet music, but mainly http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/ and http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/scores/. A lot of music publishing companies (Dover's a good example) publish facsimile editions, and keep them in the public domain. So that's where these sites get a lot of their music.

  9. Some ideas... by CyberZCat · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.8notes.com/ looks promising they're free at least. If you want more recent songs, you'll usually have to pay to download them from commercial sites, but you can save and print them right away after paying. http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/ is a good example.

    Another thing you can do is find a midi of what you want to play (use a midi search engine: http://www.musicrobot.com/ or http://www.vanbasco.com/midisearch.html ) and open in a sequencer and print the track(s) you want. Anvil Studio is a free program which can do this. http://www.anvilstudio.com/

  10. MIDI to the rescue by JonTurner · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here's a limited solution.

    Find a midi file, import it into garageband, change view to score/notation, print.

  11. Maybe we could host some? by Ankh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I experimentally put a couple of pages of sheet music on fromoldbooks.org yesterday. I'm not sure how useful they are, but I'm contemplating adding a lot more out-of-copyright sheet music.

    I'd be willing to host good quality scans from other people, too, but it has to be demonstrably out of copyright -- I'm not interested in "legal loopholes" here. I'd suggest using 1200dpi greyscale and then adjusting "curves" to make a clear, sharp image. Both the music and the typeset score must be out of copyright, as well as the lyrics. In the US and Canada this is generally easy to determine, but for music produced in other countries it can be arbitrarily difficult; anything printed before 1820 or so is pretty safe though.

    This doesn't really help the original poster very much unless I happen to have some specific piece of music, of course!

    --
    Live barefoot!
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  12. Free-Scores.com by dilbert627 · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.free-scores.com/index_uk.php3 This is the best resource I've found. The quality on some is better than others, but they have a pretty good selection of classical pieces.

  13. What I'm really looking for... by Crymson4 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ok, perhaps I wasn't overly clear in the original post - what I'm really looking for are some Trumpet solo pieces that are Renaissance period. I'm active in the SCA (medieval re-enactment) and while I know that the trumpet wasn't present in its current form, it's what I know how to play. So, I'd like to find some period pieces that I cna play by myself. Most of the classical stuff I find is for strings, or full arrangements for an orchestra. I'm interested simply in trumpet solo pieces. Does that help narrow it down any? Thanks for the replies so far!

  14. Tricky wording by BeeBeard · · Score: 2, Informative
    Good resource, but make sure you don't misunderstand this statement from that linked FAQ:

    The problem with these practices is that a publisher, having added this copyrighted material, or edited the text even in a minor way, may simply put a copyright notice on the whole book, even though the main part of it -- the text itself -- is in the public domain!
    (emphasis added)

    That "may" that I bolded DOES NOT MEAN that the publisher has a legally enforceable new copyright (i.e. it doesn't mean "may" as in "they are permitted"), only that this is a common tactic that a publisher might employ to try to give the impression that they have created a new work that is subject to copyright.
  15. Score by bellyjean · · Score: 3, Informative

    Pianofiles

  16. Sheet Music Consortium by sonsonete · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You might check out the Sheet Music Consortium. This is an effort by music libraries at UC Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University to digitize much of their public domain sheet music. Also includes links to other on-line sheet music.

    --
    "Folks bent on reinventing the wheel should understand that if it's not round, it ain't a wheel." - Jonah Goldberg