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Open Well-Tempered Clavier: a Kickstarter Campaign For Open Source Bach
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."
I believe you meant "libre et gratuit". :p
Why "open source" for a musical recording, why not just "public domain"?
It's because "open source" sounds cool?
The 4-CD set by Andras Schiff was the first recording I ever had to save and scrimp for, when I was still back in high school, and it's been worth every penny. I had heard one track and was told the rest was great, and it is. I'm a drummer, but listening to this recording a couple hundred times is probably responsible for any melodic and harmonic sense I may have developed at that time. I haven't heard the version referenced in TFA, but it's hard to make this music sound bad. Highly recommended in principle.
As of this post, they have over $3,600.
I can get a public domain version for $50 ... OK make that $500 - I forgot how old I am.
Get starving music school student with great talent to play and record this piece and then release it as an MPsomehting or whatever. Contrary to what the asshole music industry has you believe, there are much more talented folks in the world than their products.
Sorry,I don't like this.
There also exists public domain recording by musopen.org, which will probably pale in comparison, but nonetheless it's great that these efforts exist.
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!
It'd be great to see a similar project for Kreutzer's violin studies...
Why would this J. S. Bach guy write any more music if people are just going to steal it?
But we all believe in Bach !
Correction, I believe it's called a fortepiano, not a piano-forte.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortepiano
Table-ized A.I.
Companies like Peters that do sell good accurate scores of Bach are so behind the times they literally cannot see the forest because the trees are still being cut down. It is entirely possible for them to distribute decent editions for sale in e-pub and the technology to put scores on e-ink could be made usable with essentially e-reader technology that is score sized instead of pocket book. I would gladly pay for a decent music e-ink reader that would work on my music stand. The information age is slogging along and eventually the real potential of digital music notation will happen. But unfortunately we still have those who have their heads up their assets in the music publishing industry.
Werner was a stickler for accurate notation and much of what is there on the historic digital archive, especially the Bach section, is very accurate. Unfortunately since his death others have corrupted what he started and some of the archive is not good or even accurate notation, however most of the Bach is excellent and done by people who understand the importance of accuracy in music notation. Many of the scores adhere to original source where ever possible. Which can be very difficult as in the time of the great champions of Bach's music during the late classical era much of Bach's sheet music had fallen into oblivion.
For instance a friend of Felix Mendelssohn actually found music scores by Bach being used by a butcher to wrap meats! So the digitizing for all time of all our great heritage of written music is as important as project Gutenberg. Werner understood this as many others do and either the existing music publishing houses will get on board or they will be a footnote in the history of written music.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
is that audiences are not interested in an academic reference recording of Bach but in the richly varied interpretations of artists each with their own gifts --- using arrangements of their own choice, instruments of their own choice, in a venue of their own choice.
It is like trying to capture Shakespeare in a bottle.
Uncork the thing and what you will get is a performance wholly typical of the acting style and staging of the year the play was recorded.
Clearly makes no 'cent's, if some organisms within the biosphere have evolved to hear an imaginary sound scale of equal bastardisation to the populations 'temperament'. One could fund such distortions in the cochlioidal inner nature of ones sound sensors, make take ye-ears for SUM to understand, come out of their 'shell' && "sea" the truth with watt their audience may hear hear. A small bone to pick that spirals through the 'octaves' of the spectrum leading to fine 'expression' with application in cosmological physics woven into ones 'score'. How does this 'tuning' offer 'natural' NOT imaginary understanding of ones 'resonance' through the 'harmonics' of the 'scale' one wishes to 'measure' ? Any point going on similar to a broken 'record' ? Clearly you all are 'bach'-ing up the wrong branch of the tree of life, a result of becoming a disciple of incorrect teachings that lack understanding of more Pythagorean 'harmony'. Maybe transmigration back to the source will assist with 'cent-sible' 'composition' of future pieces to 'conduct' the 'orchestration' of events 'rehearsed'. Also with 8 bit resolution you may need a low pass filter to 'temper' your 'binaural' 'beat' noise when contorting your instruments to sound similar to a compressed zip package as you 'pitch' bend your lack of quantum wobble.
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Where do I get a cantankerous clavier?
Table-ized A.I.