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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?
According to Wikipedia:
In music, the BACH motif is the motif, a succession of notes important or characteristic to a piece, B flat, A, C, B natural. In German musical nomenclature, in which the note B natural is written as H and the B flat as B, it forms Johann Sebastian Bach's family name.
That's what the article says, but I don't understand it. The only hand-written music on that Wikipedia web page shows B A C H written as four notes on a treble clef staff, not written as four letters. (This is on the right edge of the web page, half-way down.) So I don't know what they mean by saying that B natural is written as H, and B flat is written as B.
In music, the BACH motif is the motif, a succession of notes important or characteristic to a piece, B flat, A, C, B natural. In German musical nomenclature, in which the note B natural is written as H and the B flat as B, it forms Johann Sebastian Bach's family name.
That's what the article says, but I don't understand it. The only hand-written music on that Wikipedia web page shows B A C H written as four notes on a treble clef staff, not written as four letters. (This is on the right edge of the web page, half-way down.) So I don't know what they mean by saying that B natural is written as H, and B flat is written as B.
The explanation above is correct, but very unclearly worded.
In German nomenclature, the notes of the c major scale are read as:
C-D-E-F-G-A-H(-C)
There is a note called "B": The one a half tone under H.
So this is indeed read "B-A-C-H" in German
(where it would of course also be considered to be written as such...).
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.