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Crowdfunding Campaign Seeks a Libre Recording of a Newly-Completed Bach Work (kickstarter.com)
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Robert Douglass's Kickstarter campaigns have resulted in free fan-funded open source recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations and the 48 pieces in his Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. "Even Richard Stallman found these recordings, and he promptly wrote an email encouraging us to drop the word 'Open' in favor of 'Free' or 'Libre'," Douglas tells BoingBoing (adding "when RMS writes you telling you to change the name of your music project, you change the name of your music project.")
Now Douglass is crowdfunding a libre recording of Bach's last masterpiece, 20 fugues developed from a single theme called "the Art of the Fugue". "He wanted to culminate in a final fugue that literally spells his name, B-A-C-H, in musical notation," remembers Douglass, but "unfortunately, Bach died before completing that work, and it has remained a musical mystery (and tragedy) for hundreds of years." Fortunately Kimiko Ishizaka completed the work in 2016, "based on the music that Bach left us... This new composition will also be released under a Creative Commons license as part of the new OpenScore.cc project... Kimiko is eminently grateful to her fans and supporters of free culture for allowing her to focus all of her energies on growing the public domain and bringing the music of J.S. Bach to a far broader audience than ever imagined."
They're also rewarding supporters with tickets to two live performances -- one at Carnegie Hall in New York City and one in Hamburg's new Elbphilharmonie.
Now Douglass is crowdfunding a libre recording of Bach's last masterpiece, 20 fugues developed from a single theme called "the Art of the Fugue". "He wanted to culminate in a final fugue that literally spells his name, B-A-C-H, in musical notation," remembers Douglass, but "unfortunately, Bach died before completing that work, and it has remained a musical mystery (and tragedy) for hundreds of years." Fortunately Kimiko Ishizaka completed the work in 2016, "based on the music that Bach left us... This new composition will also be released under a Creative Commons license as part of the new OpenScore.cc project... Kimiko is eminently grateful to her fans and supporters of free culture for allowing her to focus all of her energies on growing the public domain and bringing the music of J.S. Bach to a far broader audience than ever imagined."
They're also rewarding supporters with tickets to two live performances -- one at Carnegie Hall in New York City and one in Hamburg's new Elbphilharmonie.
Douglas tells BoingBoing (adding "when RMS writes you telling you to change the name of your music project, you change the name of your music project.")
Really? I think quite a lot of musicians would tell him RMS to take a hike.
as copyright periods run out, in next few decades, recordings of music from earlier part of 20th century (and increasingly great quality) will flood the audience.
even more than new libre recordings, i think there should be a project to catalog and publish such music to public.
He wants to spell his name in musical notation?
Since when is there an "H" is musical notation?
RMS has spoken!
I completed that a few years ago. Even added "H" as a note. It's revolutionary! Someone pay me to record this work that is by Bach!
RMS travels the planet, explaining the difference between "free software" and "open source software "to crowds. Having attended these, I will do my best to convey the knowledge.
Free has two meanings, free as in beer and free as in freedom. Free as in freedom is often interpreted as libre or liberated software. With the first definition, the GPL never tells vendors that they must give their software away without compensation. With the second definition, customers are given the right to the source code of the product that they purchased. Through the four freedoms, liberated software makes it possible for a customer to maintain their own source code if the vendor goes out of business. Liberated software makes it possible for customers to examine the source code for back doors. By comparison, proprietary software often becomes abandonware - unsupported binary blobs that can not be updated. Additionally, proprietary software often contains back doors. These back doors allow governments and malware authors alike to intrude upon your computer and you can do nothing to stop them.
Open source software means exactly that. You can read the source code. You don't have any special rights to improve (modify) the software or redistribute those improvements to others. Additionally, some licenses allow vendors to take this source code and lock it into their proprietary product. Apple does this with BSD. Imagine a BSD developer being deprived of the source code that they wrote. In the end, the customer is deprived of the benefits of free software.
I'm not a musician, but a programmer. I write software for a living, and am paid for it. About half the software I write is released as free/libre, the other half isn't. I get paid the same.
This is easy to extrapolate to musicians: pay for the performance and recording, and pay for the copyright to be brought under a free license.
Case in point -- when RMS told Linus to change the name of his O/S to GNU/Linux, Torvalds immediately complied.
The /. title calls it a "Newly-Completed Bach Work." Just to be clear, the final fugue from "Art of Fugue" has been "completed" many times over the past two centuries. Musicians as eminent as Riemann, Busoni, and Tovey have proposed completions that have been published, performed, and recorded. Wikipedia has a good article.
I haven't heard Ishizaka's version, but no matter how fine it may be it cannot be what Bach would have composed had he finished the final fugue. At one time the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff suggested that Bach probably finished the piece at some level and that the manuscript was lost. There is another theory that Bach left the final fugue incomplete on purpose.
This was not a case of Bach on his deathbed racing to finish his magnum opus. He worked on "Art of Fugue" over several years, amid many other projects, but he became blind and then died before he had the chance to wrap it up. It is astonishingly great music but not for children. By design it is free of narrative, and it may be too austere and personal for a typical concert setting.
Commie RMS wants to destroy the livelihood of musicians
Which musicians? Bach is dead. Ishizaka is happy to release her work free (libre) to the public.
Other living composers and the estates of composers dead for less than 70 years, if and when Ishizaka's work is eventually discovered to be unintentionally similar to their work. For background, read up on the "Blurred Lines" case (Gaye v. Thicke) and the "My Sweet Lord" case (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).
write software for a living, and am paid for it. About half the software I write is released as free/libre
Is the free software that you write for a living entertainment software? I ask because music is entertainment, and mainstream entertainment has been less quick to adopt libre licensing than software used in production by businesses.
This is easy to extrapolate to musicians: pay for the performance and recording, and pay for the copyright to be brought under a free license.
This is similar to how the community bought Blender from bankrupt publisher NaN for a fire-sale price of $100,000 back in 2002, an early proof of concept of crowdfunding. But unlike NaN at the time, most record labels and music publishers aren't in bankruptcy and therefore won't accept such a lowball price for the copyright.
Should be "When Richard Stallman tells you to do something: You install vim."
Jehovah's Witnesses carefully refer to the gratis literature of their publisher Watch Tower as "without charge" because Watch Tower publications certainly aren't free as in libre. In fact, in 2012, Watch Tower became infamous for asserting its copyright against parodies of a skit from its animated series Become Jehovah's Friend. (This was the "Sparlock" incident, if you follow that.)
Nor does "free" mean zero copyright. A work in the public domain is free, but a copyrighted work is also free if its copyright owner offers it under a license meeting this criteria.
Perhaps if you consistently refer to gratis distribution as "without charge" in a work, it may be easier for readers to understand your explanation of the difference between that and free.
Historically copyright tends to get extended retroactively when it is about to expire for work of value.
That's a coincidence. The 1978 extension was to align U.S. copyright term with the Berne Convention that had been the law in other countries for several decades, and the 1998 extension was to reconcile the copyright term with the advances in health care of the twentieth century. The underlying rationale behind the term remained unchanged, namely the life of the author's grandchildren. But when uphelding the 1998 extension, the Supreme Court warned Congress against a third extension: unless Congress gives a damn good reason, the Court may find "legislative misbehavior."
So they've finally found a way to eliminate the punchline from the old "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" - now the answer is "Kickstarter", apparently.
I can't stand Glenn Gould's recordings because of his irritating humming in the background. Angela Hewitt's or Murray Perahia's recordings are much better, and 2CD sets of same can be had for the price of a few cups of coffee, so why would anyone want to slum it with old mono recordings (unless you're one of those strange Glenn Gould worshippers)?
You sound like my son who won't watch old movies because he thinks black and white is inferior. Gould's humming is annoying but doesn't intrude too much unless you let it.
Gould's humming is not something that can be ignored, and coupled with the inferior sound quality, it just adds up to a very unpleasant listening experience. I don't own any Gould CDs because I won't buy them, not even at bargain basement prices. Life is too short to be subjected to bad quality audio and Gould's inability to keep his mouth shut during recording has put him at the bottom of my list :-)
From the human perspective, the GPL places restrictions on source code that BSD does not. That is an obvious clear reading of both licenses.
Consider the rights of the source code itself. Sometimes I wonder if RMS considers source code to be a person with it's own rights. If you examine the four freedoms, the outcome is that the source code remains free.
To guarantee the freedom of GPL code, restrictions are placed on vendors by the authors of the code. It is the author's right to do so, and nobody is forcing any vendor to distribute GPL code.
The totally unrestricted BSD license allows the code to be withheld from customers, resulting in a product that is eventually destined for obsolescence and abandonment. The labor of the programmers may then be lost to history, along with any knowledge generated along the way. Some vendors prefer code with such a license as it guarantees a steady income from repeat customers while spreading the expense of programming.
The way in which the licenses are interpreted determines the perspective. Which license is better, GPL or BSD? It's a trick question that devolves into an argument.
Did Bach die before completing his self-referential piece, or did it kill him? Was he drawn into it? Is he still in there? A far better fate than a misplaced accidental, being run over by a Ricecar, impaled by a contrapuntal counterpoint or a baroquen heart. When great composers decompose to compositions of rich melodious compost, the wit oft exceeds the whiff.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>