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Open-Source Bach; Copyright-Free Goldbergs
rDouglass writes "An open source music notation software (MuseScore) and an award winning pianist (Kimiko Ishizaka) are raising money to create a new score and a new recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. They will release both works to the public domain (copyright-free) using the Creative Commons Zero tool. This bypasses usual copyright protections that are given to each published edition of the score and each individual recording of the piece, and addresses a gap in the availability of free (gratis/libre) versions of the work. MuseScore scores are XML based and are thus like the source code for music. They can also be embedded into websites and linked with YouTube videos, creating rich multimedia experiences. The Kickstarter project has begun recently and $4,000 has been raised."
Are you saying it's not innovating? Classical sheet music is very, very expensive.
It's not innovating and creating new if you take existing sheet music...
The Goldberg Variations were made a pop classic (oxymoron?) by Glenn Gould in 1955, becoming a million seller. If you're new to Bach try The Well-Tempered Clavier. A. Hewitt's recordings of both of the above are more recent and very good in my opinion.
MIDI is a pita to read.
They are innovating. Just not in games. See: latest commits to Linux kernel, Apache, LZMA(2), Android, Firefox and Chromium outpacing IE, the website you're posting on...
Why not midi? As a musician, I'll ask you a parallel question: Why not write all documents in flat text? Who needs bold, underline, different fonts, pagination etc?? Midi doesn't make pretty sheet music. It only notates "note on" or "note off" or "patch change." It doesn't even notate which score a note should be on. This means, for example, that piano music would be just about impossible to play from a raw midi dump. An XML based markup, or the TeX based Lilypond allow for pretty, easy to read, scores. On the other hand, Lilypond has a midi import feature, so MIDI IS useful. It just requires some editing to make it human playable.
There are several copyright-free scores at IMLSP (direct link).
MIDI is very limited. MIDI was set up 30 years ago as a communication interface, and by today's standards it's a poor one- you're limited to one note per millisecond. IIRC, you are also limited to 16 channels, so composing scores for an entire orchestra is out of the question.
To top it all off, it wasn't meant for music notation. Symbols like Accelerandos, Ritardandos are notably absent- changes to tempos are hardcoded. Many other symbols are absent as well. Sometimes notes need to be formatted in a special way (ie- for readability, or left/right hand on piano).
Anyone who has ever composed in Finale, Sibelius, etc and tried to export to midi will notice the limitations right away. Why, what's your beef with XML anyway?
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> It's not innovating and creating new if you take existing sheet music...
I agree with you. Unfortunately, the copyright laws don't really see it that way. It's a weird situation where even a 200 year old music is under some protection (performances are protected, the written sheet music is protected). If you wanted to set your home video to some (100+ year old) classical music, where would you get the soundtrack? Even my digital piano (Roland) disables the MIDI out when playing the built-in classical pieces. I look forward to putting it into Rosegarden, piping it through a softsynth and the digital piano and enjoy a truly "surround sound" experience.
Actually, performances are a new work (they add something not found in the scores, as can be checked by listening to performances by different artists).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
While Lilypond produces beautiful scores, the syntax of its files is not very stable and changes from version to version. If you want to release a free edition of a score, then better to distribute it in a fairly established and unchanging XML format, which might then be automatically converted to the latest Lilypond instructions for engraving.
I just sent that website to our local Economic Development Office. How often do you get an offer from a world-famous pianist to play a concert for only $1000 plus travel costs (from Germany, where she is.) The whole production would end up costing under $10,000 which seems like a steal to me.
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Apparently MuseScore has been around for a long time in some form, but only recently has it started to become a real contender in same music notation space as Finale and Lilypond -- I had barely played with it until today.
Previously I've used Lilypond, which is very feature rich and produced beautiful output, but there were some things I didn't like about it. It's a non-GUI program, which is fine with me, but they kept changing the syntax of the language. Every time I installed a new version of Lilypond, I'd have to convert all my old files to the new version, and that was a big hassle. Also, for many musicians who are not programmers, the non-GUI nature of Lilypond meant that they weren't going to use it. Although there were GUI front-ends such as Denemo and Rosegarden, progress seemed extremely slow. I would check back every few years and find that they weren't really that much more capable than the last time I'd checked.
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Real sheet music doesn't indicate aftertouch, and a real piano can't even play aftertouch either. I realize there are more events to midi than the ones above, but I was focusing mostly on what you need to know to play a piece of music on an instrument. These are things like phrasing, dynamics, fingerings. It also involves placing notes on the score in a conventional manner so that they are quickly understandable- Whether the stem of a note points up or down, for example, depends on many things, none of which MIDI notates.
I suggest you look into Glenn Gould's work with the Goldberg Variations if you really think that.
In case you've never heard of the Goldberg Variations, I suggest having a listen to either of the versions by Glenn Gould (1955 or 1981). Both are incredible, and the technicality of the piece is staggering; there is one movement with differing time signatures (18/16 and 3/4) on each hand, that exchange hands, repeatedly . There are some who consider it good thinking music.
It's funny, but I had never noticed until now that there aren't public domain versions of this piece; it's really quite eye-opening that people can recognize probably half a dozen classical pieces because they've been used so much (because they are public domain), but one of the greatest pieces by one of the greatest composers hasn't entered into the public awareness simply because of the tyranny known as copyright.
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I suggest you look into Glenn Gould's work with the Goldberg Variations if you really think that.
He is the closest thing to God that's ever played them...
A concert violinist dies and goes to heaven. St. Peter shows him around, telling him they're delighted that he's here to play in the heavenly symphony orchestra. They look in on a rehearsal and there's a tyrannical bearded white-haired conductor. "Who's that?" asks the violinist. "Oh that's God," says Peter, "he thinks he's Von Karajan."
I am not a crackpot.
What the FUCK? MIDI can render piano "perfectly"? Are you mad? 128 levels of velocity is absolutely woeful when it comes to phrasing and articulation.
I'm not denying that performances are a new work. What I was trying to get at is that the music that was free can only be had via listening to copyrighted performances, or copyrighted transcriptions. So now you have a situation where music that didn't even have copyright protection at the time it was created (and if they did at that time, they certainly would have entered public domain by now) are only available via copyright.
Material that was in public domain effectively entered copyright. The exact opposite of what the copyright system is meant to facilitate.
Fortunately there are plenty of people with the love of the music that has played or sequenced the pieces and placed the resulting MIDI files online. They are a simple Google search away.
I have been known to take a few and re-voice them, change the tempo, add a track, remove a track, etc to make my own arrangement of them that sounds great on an XG synth.
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Contrary to TFA, there are CC licensed scores in Lilypond format available through Mutopia. As far as PDF scans and such, as other posters have mentioned, there are innumerable resources.
The big questions for me (disclaimer: I'm a professional classical pianist) is that of scholarly review. The go-to publisher for Bach today is Bärenreiter/Neue Bach Ausgabe, and by and large, any edition of Bach that I use that isn't Bärenreiter should ideally be cross referenced with it. Of course, it is very expensive to purchase, but it is one item that any university with a music program simply must have in its library. What concerns me is that TFA simply is vague who or what they mean by scholarly review, and this alone would prevent me from considering it over current alternatives.
IMHO the value in the project will be a (hopefully) excellent recording that is CC licensed, as there doesn't appear to be any decent recordings of the sort (through a cursory search), unless you include Wanda Landowska's eccentric harpsichord recordings from 1945. Genius is already easily available in recordings on piano by Gould (both 1955 and 1981), Schiff, Hewitt, Barenboim, Perahia, and Leonhardt on harpsichord.
And it's not just in composition software or performances like in the article.
There's some nice synth/digital audio workstation software too. These come fairly well packaged with their own sample kits, integrated synthesizers, LADSPA effects, and plugin support for other things like soundfonts and VST effects and instruments. I believe all of them also save music in XML as well. (Perhaps not the same exact format, but I'm sure they'd be easy enough to convert since labels appear to make sense.) XML is kind of cool, because it should be possible to integrate music into other things with scripting that can readily parse it for things like light-shows or 3D animation. (Easy to trigger events in different ways. So now its just a matter of imagination limiting how one would geek-out with music.) In a way the current FOSS music software scene it reminds me of where FOSS 3D software was about 10 years ago. Tons of potential, just needs people to get on the bandwagon so that it can further develop and match or exceed its commercial peers.
Ardour for Linux and OSX. This one is supposed to be nice. (I haven't tried it yet. I'm waiting for somebody to roll out the Win32 binary.) From what I've seen, it's geared towards the professional. (Looks similar to Cubase?)
LMMS for Linux and Windows. From my experience this one is very easy to use (similar to FL Studio, from what many have said), but has many rough edges. So as quick as it is to get going and doing some very complex things, doing some things with fine control or nuance is harder than it should be. But don't knock it, it's very powerful for what it is.
Unison Music Production Studio for ???... They still haven't started much yet. I've heard comments that LMMS is supposed to merge with this. I'm taking the wait and see approach here.
Some examples? Sure. I think the music in these videos represents the software fairly well.
NIN remix in Ardour
An original score made using LMMS.
I'll also mention Audacity even though it's not a DAW, it is a rather nice recording software and it works well for using alongside the other software here. But I'm sure everyone here already knows about this one.
So if you're a musician or perhaps just wanting to play around with music as a hobby, there's plenty of software to look into. No more excuses about not being able to afford it.
As someone who has learned piano pieces by looking at piano roll representations of MIDI files in a sequencer, i would have to disagree.
The arbitrary usage of a heptatonic scale makes little sense when it all comes down to 12 tones in the end. Traditional notation is not necessarily easier to read at all, it is just far more common among musicians.