An anonymous reader writes 'Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the available for the first time free on the Internet. Although most classical music is obviously too old to be under copyright, the rights to specific editions of pieces are owned by the publishers. Now, the has acquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work on the internet. The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity.' Well, in the US, Copyright law covers public performace of a work under copyright. You may not perform a work publicly without the permission of the copyright owner. But the 'work' in question would be a musical composition by Mozart that has long since fallen into public domain, not the specific editions offered here.
The only reason these publishers get to claim copyright on their publications of PD compositions are: 1) actual 'editions,' that is, changes to the music based on new manuscripts, musicologi. 'published copies of them are still under copyright by whomever published them' fuck them!
X Major (02:08) Wiener Mozart-Ensemble Willy Boskovsky. Andante in F Major, K616 (08:27) Daniel Chorzempa - organ Deutsche Bachsolisten Helmut Winschermann. Sep 7, 2016 - It's been a quarter-century since Philips Classics released their Complete Mozart Edition back in 1991 (the bicentennial of Mozart's death),.
Mozart's music is a universal cultural hallmark of mankind. Arranging and formatting music is extremely difficult and complex. How many people would I have killed for sheet music with better typesetting? Granted, not quite as difficult or awe-inspiring as composing a masterpiece.
But, typesetters and arrangers do the world a great service by making the music playable - and if you want to photocopy the version t. But seriously, the proper phrase is that you want someone else's information to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Look, if some dude feeds 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, it's a miracle. If Linus Thorvalds provides Linux for all of mankind from a single master copy, big whoop. Fundamentally if I eat a fish, the fish is consumed. If I watch a movie, it is not.
In classic economics you have the term 'natural price', which means the zero-profit price ignoring R&D. For the abstract concept information. Ignoring media costs - for example the difference between a blank and recorded CD - the natural cost is zero. That is the market price with perfect competition, everything else is caused by imperfections or government regulations in the market. In that sense, it's perfectly reasonable to say that information 'wants to' be free.
Of course a whole other story is that there'd be no commercial market, because you have a non-zero investment and zero profits. That is why even the founding fathers, who hardly were mouthpieces for copyright holders recognized copyright to 'promote the science and arts'. In addition, there's many other factors which means this isn't a perfect market. However, that only changes the market price, not the natural price. The more of these you remove, the more it will approach its natural price, whether you anthropomorphize it or not.
The Slashdot effect just isn't what it used to be. This could be due to a number of factors, the main ones being a decreasing number of readers, and advances in server technology. Rumor has it that many Slashdot users have moved to sites like Reddit and Digg. According to alexa.com, Digg has seen massive growth, Reddit has seen moderate growth, and Slashdot's reach has been tapering off.
I know many find Alexa's data to be suspect, but it is still worth considering. Even low-end servers today can handle massive a. I'm sorry, but perhaps you have not heard midi music in a long time. Long are the days since soundboards came with lousy samples and no effects whatsoever: todays midis, with great samples and full wav synthesis with effects applied sound almost as great as any recording, specially works for piano, harpsichord and acoustic guitar alone. I agree String sections still sound rather synthetic though.
If you're on Linux, use timidity, which is the best MIDI synthesis software available. On Windows, be sure that you have in Control Panel - Sounds and Multimedia - Audio - MIDI Reproduction set to Software Wavetable Synthethizer, otherwise it'll sound just as bad as you heard before.
Right now i'm listening to Saint Saen's Animal Carnivel and even though it includes orchestra as well as the piano, it sounds absolutely vibrant and lively! Give it another shot, i tell you. I believe i got this MIDI from here: classicalarchives.com I believe the one i'm listening in particular is this one (the byte size matches): classicalarchives.com You have to get a free registration to download and that only gives you 5 downloads a day, which is kinda lame. But the MIDI's are of superb quality. I also have another stunning source of quality MIDIs: kunstderfuge.com Free registration and 10 downloads/day.
This one is specially great for solo keyboard works. This is really a shame too. MIDI offers the potential to micromanage every instrument if you like, but so often sample libraries don't have the necessary nuance (or worse, you might not have space in your sampler for everything you want) Instruments with a fast attack can be worked around pretty well by bringing up the volume from something very low, but there's not much you can do with stuff like 'slow strings'. That's the sort of patch that's pretty much guaranteed never to sound good in a classical setti. It's interesting that this topic came up on Slashdot. Earlier today I was reading a metafilter.com about this very site, regarding downloading some of their files as PDFs.
It seems as though they present the PDFs using some sort of weird PHP interface that discourages downloading and saving them. It's also worth pointing out that the scores are not really 'free' in the free-software sense, they're released under a fairly redhost24-001.com that they are claiming applies to the scanned images of t.
It's also worth pointing out that the scores are not really 'free' in the free-software sense, they're released under a fairly restrictive license redhost24-001.com that they are claiming applies to the scanned images of the scores, independent of the scores themselves (which should be in the public domain). The only scores definitely in the public domain are Mozart's original autographs.
Engraved editions of his music, provided they were produced after 1923, are under copyright. It's the same situation. Compilations aren't necessarily copyrightable, though, and even where they are, the compilation copyright only covers the compilation, and not the material that compromises the compilation. That is, it covers a specific arrangement and selection of items, but not the items themselves. And the compilation still has to be original and creative. An uncreative one isn't copyrightable. As for it being hard work, so what?
Copyright is interested in originality, not hard work. An original limerick written in thirty. The only scores definitely in the public domain are Mozart's original autographs.
Engraved editions of his music, provided they were produced after 1923, are under copyright. By the way, that '1923' is a local US thing. The equivalent date in the UK, for example, would be '1980' (1981 from next month.): it's 25 years from the end of the year of first publication, for the copyright in an original typography of a per-se out-of-copyright work. (And editions made by photoreproduction of a previously published typography don't qualify for a fresh copyright of this kind.) It's also worth noting that this period for 'publisher's' copyrights is set by s.15 of the 1988 copyright act in the UK and was left unchanged when the duration of the author's copyrights was extended from 50 years to 70 years from the end of the year of the author's death (1995 regulations). Aside from that, plenty of useful Mozart scores (e.g.
Many from Breitkopf and Haertel) were published in the 19th century, and are copyright-free even in the US, where Dover Publications for a long time provided a very useful service by republishing quite some numbers of them at reasonable prices. Creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts is painstaking work, it's no surprise that copyright law covers this process as well as that of purely original works. The copyright in the NMA (Baerenreiter) scores appears to depend on two factors, (a) fresh typography and (b) the extent of significant editorial revisions. The first factor applies to all of the new-set scores, (and where the 25-year rule applies, some of these copyrights are already approaching or have even reached their end).
The second factor may possibly not apply to all works, because to produce them it was certainly not usually a matter of 'creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts', some of the new editions differ from the old out-of-copyright ones by nothing more than a few corrected articulation-marks here or there - like a few commas or periods of musical punctuation. But where the second factor does apply, it will presumably be an author's copyright timed by the lifetime + 70 years of the significant editor if any. Like one of the earlier posters, I also don't 'get it' that a scan of an out-of-copyright score can attract a fresh copyright - and yet, it was a private assertion of this kind (not tested in any court as far as I know) that effectively drove a set of scans of old and out-of-copyright Mozart scores off the internet within the past few years.
The complexity of copyright provisions, and their general unknown-ness, is clearly in itself a factor that takes away people's freedoms even to part of the extent that laws supposedly assure those freedoms. It is not often enough mentioned that, in this way, legal complications in themselves limit freedom. Some of the stuff looks like PDF, but is really just a huge assembly of images. The PHP isn't as relevant as the AJAX. Anyway, one very easy way to force a download is to run Firefox without the Acrobat plugin. I use a 64-bit Firefox, but you can probably do this with a portable Firefox, or by temporarily renaming/removing the acrobat plugin dll (or so) from your Firefox plugin dir.
Make sure your download settings don't automatically open Acrobat, then simply go to one of these pages. It'll prompt.
The site has much more features than simply the downloading of scores. It also allows the text searching of critical reports and scholarly articles, which is a very valuable resource. One must remember the site is for both amateur and professional musician/musicologists, and so something like bittorrent would be totally insufficient for the features they have planned. Plus, professional musicians are generally computer-illiterate (I say this as a professional musician myself).
The problem with the site that. Before anyone gets too excited - there are plenty of public-domain editions of Mozart.
This is just one particular edition that's going to be available online for free. There's actually a huge amount of PD sheed music available at mutopiaproject.org. The nice thing about the Mutopia stuff is that it's in a format that's editable using free software (Lilypond).
For instance, I've taken some Mozart horn duets and arranged them so my daughter and I can play them on violin and viola. Because it's in Lilypond format, it's easy to transpose, arrange, whatever. If all you want is digital scans of PD editions, there are dmoz.org. One thing that seems a little goofy about the NMA thing is that they make you agree to use this web site only for personal study and not to make copies except for my personal use under 'Fair Use' principles of Copyright law as defined in this license agreement. Fair use is an exception to copyright.
Hell, I can copy a Britney Spears CD and call it fair use. Before anyone gets too excited - there are plenty of public-domain editions of Mozart. This is very exciting news. There are indeed some public-domain editions of a very tiny subset of Mozart's compelete works. Mutopia is the best example, but even there, a keyword search on 'Mozart' gives only about 60 hits - for Leopold and Wolfgang combined.
Well, Wolfgang composed 626+ opusses, so at best Mutopia has 10%. In fact far less becase many are incomplete scores (fragments, extracted parts, a. What they have put up is hardly 'free'; it requires you to agree to a license agreement that limits you to 'personal use' under 'fair use' principles.
Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before. Companies like Barereiter have been playing tricks with copyright for a long time, for example, by slightly modifying sheet music every few years with meaningless (and often, erroneous) 'interpretations'. This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet.
There is no reason why Mozart's entire body of work shouldn't be digitized and freely available with no restrictions on use at all, in a form like Project Gutenberg. The copyright is expired on the works, but not on this particular edition of the works, which is a particularly well-researched one. Think of an edition as being like a translation from another language.
You could, if you want, transcribe the music yourself from Mozart's original documents, if you had them. (They're in various libraries and collections throughout the world; a friend of mine worked with some at the Library of Congress.) In fact, there are often several originals, some incomplete and some conflicting with each other. It's a lot of work, like doing a translation, and like a translation, the resulting document is itself a new work with a new original copyright date. Pretty slick how they convinced a charitable trust to pony up six figures to grant us rights we pretty much already have. You have the right to use editions of Mozart in the public domain.
That does not necessarily give you what you need for academic study, public or private performance. How do you interpret Mozart's original manuscripts?
What instruments did he write for? Under what conditions was his music performed? It is not a trivial problem to resurrect a computer game that has been out of print for t. This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet. And I'd like as much as the next person to see the complete Mozart truly free, 'as in speech'. But that does not negate the fact that this is a very significant event.
![Mozart complete works download Mozart complete works download](http://jj5.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/jj5/image/CIMG3602s.jpg)
I agree that it isn't free as in 'free speech', only as in 'free beer'. But before today, it was free in neither sense.
This is still a HUGE step in the right direction. As a violinist, for all practical purposes, I have the complete Mozart available to me. Even if I can't perform from these scores in public (I don't know if that's the case, just guessing), at least I can get these scores. I can practice them. I can study them.
I can even memorize them. And for the tiny percentage that I even want to perform in public, my orchestera will still have to pay up to rent the scores, as they've always done. Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before. You'd first have to get your hands on them. Sure, you can argue that my rights under copyright haven't changed, versus previously-available versions. I could, under 'fair use', xerox a printed edition that I'd purchassed, and use it in the same way that I can now use a download from this site.
True in theory, but I'd still have to pony up literally hundreds of dollars for a half-decent edition of a complete score for a major work such as a symphony. In practice, it was prohibitively expensive to get your hands on this stuff before today, and impossible in a lot of cases. Now, it's a mouse click away.
And before you remind me of Mutopia and others, just take a browse through them. Mutopia, for example, has about 60 hits for Mozart. Even if we assume each one is a complete score to a unique opus in original instrumentation, with all parts included - a highly optimistic assumption! - that's still less than 10% of Mozart's works.
This is a big deal. Think about how this impacts a musician's opportunities to learn music. Right now, if I hear a piece that I like, there's essentially no way to just take a look at the score, play with it for a few hours. Decide whether it's right for me and whether to go ahead and purchase the score. Before I can see a single measure, I have to make a major financial commitment.
True, if the piece is the solo of a very popular concerto or work for solo instrument, there might be an arangement in the local music store, that's authentic enough to get a taste of it. But, if it's, say, a violin part for a symphony, or some such, you are totally out of luck. Short of springing hundreds of dollars, you can't even get to look at it.
![Complete Complete](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125444704/272680568.jpg)
But now, if it's a Mozart piece, you CAN take a look. This is great. Postscript: I agree with the parent posting, by the way. It is a shame that public domain doesn't exist (for all practical purposes), even for 250 year-old compositions. I just want to point out that this announcement is still wonderful news for all Mozart-loving musicians. Many people here seem, as expected, look more on the copyright side of the issue. The fact is, getting such an edition together is.not.
easy by any stretch. That particular edition itself (Neue Mozart-Ausgabe) took 36 years (finished in 1991) to complete. Consider the amount of money that has to be paid to musicologists to do research for the 35 years. Obviously Barenreiter doesn't want to give it away for free. So the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum.bought. the rights of online publication from Barenreiter, and of course even then there will be limits to what you can do with it. Obviously you cannot use these scans to publish and sell your own version of it.
I consider Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum very very generous, and I thank them for it. Also, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe is NOT public domain in any sense of the word, because of the editing. As professional musicians know, editing is.not.
something you suddenly decide to do, or something where you change a few notes and that's that. It is a long process where you research all evidence (including conflicting ones), and try to build an edition that the composer himself would have approved of. And for most editions (and all of the Barenreiter ones) a critical report comes with each piece; and it documents the path of research and the evidence used. If you want truly public domain Mozart scores, try the Alte Mozart-Ausgabe (the old complete edition), which is completely in the public domain, with partial scans if it circulating around the net. Though, if you checked on wikipedia, you'll realize how big a difference there is between the Alte and Neue Mozart-Ausgabes.
They admit the works of Mozart are in the public domain but not the scanned images of the music. They admit $400,000 was paid to purchase the rights to the edition, which is being put online 'for free' by two foundations, but they still require that anybody not accessing solely for themselves (and I would assume this includes teachers and orchestras in this too) may not use it, but instead must purchase from a 'authorized' vendor.
These are not nice people who from one side of their mouths say they are doing. They admit $400,000 was paid to purchase the rights to the edition, which is being put online 'for free' by two foundations, but they still require that anybody not accessing solely for themselves (and I would assume this includes teachers and orchestras in this too) may not use it, but instead must purchase from a 'authorized' vendor. These are not nice people who from one side of their mouths say they are doing a public service while from the other side they force you to lie basically, if you want to shar.
Finale is a headache to use and a travesty to the original designers of Postscript. Lilypond actually makes a serious attempt to reproduce music with good fonts and human spacing.
I have seen too many ideas slaughtered by Finale's incredibly bad spacing. Both Finale and Lilypond allow you to precisely place things.
Just because Finale has a better GUI than Lilypond's (GNU Denemo isn't all that hot.) does not mean that it is magically better somehow. As a professional musician, I cannot seriously recommend. The site's design is a technical and usability disaster. It appears to be a mixture of JPEG page images grouped to look like a book, scanned documents in PDF format, huge PDF proofs complete with their crop marks, PDF files generated on the fly, and previously cached content. Opaque URLs, frames, gratuitous uses of Javascript, and botched internationalization complete the picture. A more simple design for the site would be a lot more usable and consume considerably less bandwidth and CPU power.
Unfortunately, too often non-technical managers get to make technical decisions and supervise web development. They invariably go for eye candy, ignoring usability and performance issues. Publishing legacy formats on the web uspto.gov, but the result really doesn't got to be this bad. And they will find a way for one of their members to place it under Copyright so anyone using Mozart's music could and would face lawsuits.
This edition is copyrighted. Mozart in the original would be of use only to an academic - How do you read his notation? What instruments was he writing for?
- and so on. Students are being given 'fair use' rights to study modern 'translations' of Mozart. Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters. Mozart in the original would be of use only to an academic - How do you read his notation? What instruments was he writing for? - and so on.
I'd agree with you if you were talking pre-C16th. But with a small number of exceptions (trumpet being one - the valved instrument was very new at the time, and pianos weren't built to carry over a large symphony orchestra), Mozart's available instrumentation was at most marginally different to the resources of a chamber orchestra today, and his notation is near as dammit the same. Even reading his handwritten notation is pretty easy by comparison - you don't get any of the scratchings out and revisions of many composers. Mozart seemed to have it all there in his head in finished form, and it was all a matter of just writing it down, so the first draft is the same quality as most composers' fair copy. Makes the rest of us green with envy, btw.
Complete Mozart Edition - Philips, 180CD's.mht 674.73 KB LINK - Complete Mozart Edition - Philips, 180CD's.txt 158 bytes Mozart - Box 1 - Violin Concertos.xspf 60.5 KB Mozart - Box 2 - Serenades - Dances.xspf 261.25 KB Mozart Edition.jpg 46.08 KB CDImage.ape 296.47 MB CDImage.ape.cue 3.16 KB Complete Mozart Edition, Vol. 01, Early Symphonies (Disc 1) - Neville Mariner, Academy of St.
857 bytes img421.jpg 630.13 KB img422.jpg 393.22 KB CDImage.ape 319.33 MB CDImage.ape.cue 3.83 KB Complete Mozart Edition, Vol. 01, Early Symphonies (Disc 2) - Neville Mariner, Academy of St. 857 bytes img423.jpg 631.59 KB img424.jpg 400.76 KB CDImage.ape 327.04 MB CDImage.ape.cue 3.22 KB Complete Mozart Edition, Vol. 01, Early Symphonies (Disc 2) - Sir Neville Marinner - Acadamy of.
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857 bytes img432.jpg 633.12 KB img433.jpg 387.61 KB CDImage.ape 295.02 MB CDImage.ape.cue 2.96 KB img434.jpg 632.7 KB img435.jpg 409.96 KB Symphonien 21-41.log 789 bytes CDImage.ape 265.3 MB CDImage.ape.cue 2.26 KB img436.jpg 637.89 KB img437.jpg 386.67 KB Mozart - Symphonien 21-33 CD 2.log 808 bytes CDImage.ape 293.97 MB CDImage.ape.cue 2.58 KB img438.jpg 631.41 KB img439.jpg 378.65 KB Symhonien 21-41 disc 3.log 796 bytes CDImage.ape 305.02 MB CDImage.ape.cue 1.62 KB img440.jpg 625.38 KB img441.jpg 402.59 KB Mozart - Symphonies 21-41 Vol.