Slashdot Mirror
Complete Mozart Works Now Free
An anonymous reader writes "Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available for the first time free on the Internet. Although most classical music is obviously too old to be under copyright, the rights to specific editions of pieces are owned by the publishers. Now, the International Mozart Foundation has acquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work on the internet. The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity."
Damn straight, information wants to be free!
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Please tell him that if there was ever a use for BitTorrent, this would be it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
What they have put up is hardly "free"; it requires you to agree to a license agreement that limits you to "personal use" under "fair use" principles. Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before.
Companies like Barereiter have been playing tricks with copyright for a long time, for example, by slightly modifying sheet music every few years with meaningless (and often, erroneous) "interpretations".
This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet. There is no reason why Mozart's entire body of work shouldn't be digitized and freely available with no restrictions on use at all, in a form like Project Gutenberg.
The Slashdot effect just isn't what it used to be. This could be due to a number of factors, the main ones being a decreasing number of readers, and advances in server technology.
Rumor has it that many Slashdot users have moved to sites like Reddit and Digg. According to Alexa, Digg has seen massive growth, Reddit has seen moderate growth, and Slashdot's reach has been tapering off. I know many find Alexa's data to be suspect, but it is still worth considering.
Even low-end servers today can handle massive amounts of traffic with ease. While hundreds of hits per second could take down a 200 MHz server quite easily a few years back, it's not uncommon for even dynamically generated sites on shared hosts to barely notice a Slashdotting or even a Digging.
"I agree to use this web site only for personal study and not to make copies except for my personal use under "Fair Use" principles of Copyright law as defined in this license agreement." Doesn't sound very free to me.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
This edition is copyrighted.
Mozart in the original would be of use only to an academic --- How do you read his notation? What instruments was he writing for? --- and so on.
Students are being given "fair use" rights to study modern "translations" of Mozart.
Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters.
I wasn't aware that gocr by default translated musical scores into text. I'd expect lots of random letters if it attempted to parse those scores.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Wait... Even if that worked...
Why would you convert the midi file to an mp3, just to play with mpg123? Leaving aside for a moment that mpg321 is better, and there are better things still, why not just play the midi?
wget -r -l 0 -np -Ajpg http://dme.mozarteum.at/; gocr *.jpg | txt2midi | timidity -
After all, you're wanting to do this realtime...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You seem to think that the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and the other group purposefully imposed this restriction on the scores. I beg to differ. It is much more likely that it is Barenreiter that imposed this restriction. I cannot imagine that they would sell all the rights to the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe for a mere $400,000; it is the result of more than 35 years of research by many musicologists. I highly doubt $400,000 would even cover a third of the cost to hire these musicologists.
> I haven't seen info about Lilypond on their site, nor that they are encouraging or allowing rearrangement.
There is no reason whatsoever why they would mention Lilypond. I mean no disrespect to the Lilypond devs, but Lilypond is still years away from being able to be used professionally. Just check out Finale and the amount of functions that it has under its belt. To us professional musicians, a score is like a painting: everything *must* be in the exact place it is. There can be no compromises. If a software does not allow the freedom of basically placing any symbol in any position on the page, and even allowing the creation of completely new symbols, then it is not good enough. What Finale (and Sibelius) does well is present all this freedom in enough of a user-friendly way for people to actually use it.
Also, classical musicians are generally ambivalent towards rearrangement, and most musicologists would probably be against rearrangement. This is not a sign of arrogance as much as just a generally accepted practice, arising from late 19th century ideas regarding music (which would have be completely classical back then).
This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet.
I agree. And I'd like as much as the next person to see the complete Mozart truly free, "as in speech". But that does not negate the fact that this is a very significant event. I agree that it isn't free as in "free speech", only as in "free beer".
But before today, it was free in neither sense.
This is still a HUGE step in the right direction. As a violinist, for all practical purposes, I have the complete Mozart available to me. Even if I can't perform from these scores in public (I don't know if that's the case, just guessing), at least I can _get_ these scores. I can practice them. I can study them. I can even memorize them. And for the tiny percentage that I even want to perform in public, my orchestera will still have to pay up to rent the scores, as they've always done.
Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before.
You'd first have to get your hands on them.
Sure, you can argue that my rights under copyright haven't changed, versus previously-available versions. I could, under "fair use", xerox a printed edition that I'd purchassed, and use it in the same way that I can now use a download from this site. True in theory, but I'd still have to pony up literally hundreds of dollars for a half-decent edition of a complete score for a major work such as a symphony. In practice, it was prohibitively expensive to get your hands on this stuff before today, and impossible in a lot of cases. Now, it's a mouse click away.
And before you remind me of Mutopia and others, just take a browse through them. Mutopia, for example, has about 60 hits for Mozart. Even if we assume each one is a complete score to a unique opus in original instrumentation, with all parts included -- a highly optimistic assumption! -- that's still less than 10% of Mozart's works.
This is a _big_ deal.
Think about how this impacts a musician's opportunities to learn music. Right now, if I hear a piece that I like, there's essentially no way to just take a look at the score, play with it for a few hours. Decide whether it's right for me and whether to go ahead and purchase the score. Before I can see a single measure, I have to make a major financial commitment. True, if the piece is the solo of a very popular concerto or work for solo instrument, there _might_ be an arangement in the local music store, that's authentic enough to get a taste of it. But, if it's, say, a violin part for a symphony, or some such, you are totally out of luck. Short of springing hundreds of dollars, you can't even get to look at it. But now, if it's a Mozart piece, you CAN take a look. This is great.
Postscript: I agree with the parent posting, by the way. It is a shame that public domain doesn't exist (for all practical purposes), even for 250 year-old compositions. I just want to point out that this announcement is still wonderful news for all Mozart-loving musicians.
How sad that this is news.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I'm curious to learn how a performance of this material could be prevented.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I'm sorry, but perhaps you have not heard midi music in a long time. Long are the days since soundboards came with lousy samples and no effects whatsoever: todays midis, with great samples and full wav synthesis with effects applied sound almost as great as any recording, specially works for piano, harpsichord and acoustic guitar alone. I agree String sections still sound rather synthetic though...
T -SAENS
If you're on Linux, use timidity++, which is the best MIDI synthesis software available. On Windows, be sure that you have in Control Panel -> Sounds and Multimedia -> Audio -> MIDI Reproduction set to Software Wavetable Synthethizer, otherwise it'll sound just as bad as you heard before.
Right now i'm listening to Saint Saen's Animal Carnivel and even though it includes orchestra as well as the piano, it sounds absolutely vibrant and lively! Give it another shot, i tell you. I believe i got this MIDI from here:
http://www.classicalarchives.com/main/s.html#SAIN
I believe the one i'm listening in particular is this one (the byte size matches):
http://www.classicalarchives.com/m/0/00crnval.mid
You have to get a free registration to download and that only gives you 5 downloads a day, which is kinda lame. But the MIDI's are of superb quality.
I also have another stunning source of quality MIDIs:
http://kunstderfuge.com/
Free registration and 10 downloads/day. This one is specially great for solo keyboard works.
I don't feel like it...
"published copies of them are still under copyright by whomever published them" fuck them! Mozart's music is a universal cultural hallmark of mankind.
Arranging and formatting music is extremely difficult and complex. How many people would I have killed for sheet music with better typesetting?
Granted, not quite as difficult or awe-inspiring as composing a masterpiece. But, typesetters and arrangers do the world a great service by making the music playable - and if you want to photocopy the version they spent hours arranging, fuck you. Go get your own - Mozart's original manuscripts are free.
You're not taking advantage of a long-dead composer, but the people who spend time arranging and publishing the music. They're still alive, and deserve compensation if you use their work - but you don't have to. So relax.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Well, in the US, Copyright law covers public performace of a work under copyright. You may not perform a work publicly without the permission of the copyright owner. But the "work" in question would be a musical composition by Mozart that has long since fallen into public domain, not the specific editions offered here. The only reason these publishers get to claim copyright on their publications of PD compositions are:
:) oh well.
1) actual "editions," that is, changes to the music based on new manuscripts, musicological study, correcting obvious errors, or an editor's penchant for adding slurs and dynamics (ugh).
2) the typesetting of the work is a creative process that involves a certain amount of talent, and is not just a reproduction of the PD composition. So the actual look and feel of the notes and staves and page breaks is copyrightable.
3) arrangements/settings/orchestrations. That is beyond the scope of this discussion.
In case 1) a performance might be considered a "derivative work," but I can find no case law to support that. At any rate, it would be pushing the definition of "derivative work" since "public performance" is already covered separately. Besides, if the piece were memorized and performed from memory, how could you prove what edition was used to memorize from.
In case 2) I see no way that the copyright holder could demand that the work not be performed publicly from their typesetting. That is simply absurd, and I have never heard of a publisher making such stipulations (and I have performed in hundreds of concerts).
Anyway, I have been working for a while now to get the complete Mozart string quartets in Lilypond format and share them on Musipedia and other places, but I guess there's no point in continuing that work now, is there?