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Open Well-Tempered Clavier: a Kickstarter Campaign For Open Source Bach

Posted by Soulskill on from the giving-bach-to-the-musical-community dept.

rDouglass writes "The Open Goldberg Variations team has launched a new project to make an open source, public domain version of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. The work is significant because of its enormous influence on musicians and composers throughout history. A new studio recording, a new digital MuseScore score (with support for MusicXML and MIDI), as well as all source materials (multitrack WAV, lossless FLAC) will be provided as libre and gratis downloads. New to the project are publisher GRIN Verlag, as well as record label PARMA Recordings. GRIN and PARMA will produce and distribute the physical score and double CD, even though the digital versions are to be widely available and in the public domain. Their enthusiasm for the project runs counter to the general publishing and music industry's fear of digital file sharing, and shows growing momentum for finding new models to make free music commercially sustainable."

3 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Aack! Not on a piano again! by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A piano is a tremendously wonderful instrument for piano music. But this (Well-Tempered Clavier) is not piano music! You can make a decent-sounding performance of clavier music on the piano, just like you can transcribe a vocal for violin, but you lose a lot of the specific things the composer --- especially a master of the instrument like Bach --- put into the work. Basically, all intricate and fast-moving detail in a piece gets mushed up and lost on the piano, which is designed for a smoother, more "blended" sound than the clearly articulated single notes of pre-piano predecessors. Please, if you want an open cultural reference to Bach's keyboard music, play it on appropriate kinds of keyboard!

    1. Re:Aack! Not on a piano again! by femtobyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Much of the "tinny sounding" reputation for harpsichords was due to poorly made harpsichord reproductions from the 1930's-'50s, before good scholarship on re-inventing the art of harpsichord building had been collected, so "harpsichords" were rigged together from iron-frame, metal-stringed piano parts. A variety of more modern reproduction instruments, and restored originals, indicates that members of the harpsichord family don't generally have the clanky, tinny sound associated with mid-20th-century harpsichord music (during the initial revival of interest in older musical forms). The clavier family was often closely associated with the lute --- a very "delicate" and nuanced instrument --- during its heyday.

      I think having the "limitation" of pre-piano movements (little/no control over volume from key velocity) is important to performing Bach's keyboard music "authentically" (for a "cultural reference" production), since alternate ways around that are built into the composition/performance of pieces (nuances lost on a piano), which allow proper performances to actually be quite dynamic. One can find plenty of clavier-family instruments with a more pleasing tone to modern ears than more "aggressive" examples of harpsichords, especially not "tinny sounding" poor reproduction instruments.

  2. Re:Groundbreaking music by chuckinator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are great works like the Clavier that exist in all fields of studies, and it's a gift to all of mankind when a genius has the opportunity to complete a magnum opus of this calibre. Newton's Principia comes to mind as well as Da Vinci's Codex, but even newer and more modern studies have their own Book to follow. I have been criticized for my antiquated viewpoints on curating a library of masterpieces, but you either stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before you or you are forever doomed to recreate their process and most likely produce inferior results.