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Complete Mozart Works Now Free
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Dec 13, 2006 09:13 PM
from the eine-kleine-internet-nachtmusik dept.
from the eine-kleine-internet-nachtmusik dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works 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 International Mozart Foundation 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."
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Mozardot (Score:5, Funny)
Nope..It's lots of fans! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nope..It's lots of fans! (Score:5, Insightful)
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archive.org can be considered too. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:archive.org can be considered too. (Score:5, Informative)
This is intended for musicians who want to play or for teachers who want to use Mozart as examples in their class (instead of copying out of books, which is technically illegal, but widely done because how else are you going to conveniently give students something that they can look at and analyze and learn from?). In those cases, there would be no reason to need to download the whole thing or redistribute it. If you will accept the poor analogy, sheet music is like source code; when you learn is and perform it, it's like compiling it. Here, these people are giving out the source code, but they are making sure that the only place the source code is gotten from is their website. The license is no more onerous than the GPL; there are conditions that you must accept if you want to download and use it.
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Re:Nope..It's lots of fans! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Mozardot (Score:4, Funny)
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Slashdot effect.. (Score:5, Funny)
And now they're going to have to increase them again...
Sheet music only? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Funny)
It was milk for me. The disturbing part is that I wasn't drinking at the time.
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you convert the midi file to an mp3, just to play with mpg123? Leaving aside for a moment that mpg321 is better, and there are better things still, why not just play the midi?
wget -r -l 0 -np -Ajpg http://dme.mozarteum.at/ [mozarteum.at]; gocr *.jpg | txt2midi | timidity -
After all, you're wanting to do this realtime...
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MIDIs can sound great! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
http://www.classicalarchives.com/main/s.html#SAIN
I believe the one i'm listening in particular is this one (the byte size matches):
http://www.classicalarchives.com/m/0/00crnval.mid [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:
http://kunstderfuge.com/ [kunstderfuge.com]
Free registration and 10 downloads/day. This one is specially great for solo keyboard works.
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It's a compiler, so (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Plenty of public-domain Mozart scores (Score:5, Informative)
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.
-wb-
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Completed Mozart Now Works For Free? (Score:5, Funny)
I now command the recently re-animated corpse of Mozart to pen me a symphony, with no expectation of compensation! POST-HASTE!
Re:Completed Mozart Now Works For Free? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Completed Mozart Now Works For Free? (Score:5, Funny)
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weirdest torrent ever? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:weirdest torrent ever? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:weirdest torrent ever? (Score:5, Funny)
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Konquerer (Score:4, Informative)
other options (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I disagree.
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
that's not really "free" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty slick how they convinced a charitable trust to pony up six figures to grant us rights we pretty much already have.
I was really stoked until I went to the page and saw that.
Re:that's not really "free" (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly the problem that copyright law is supposed to prevent!!!
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That's not really "free"... On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. 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. 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. 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.
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Re:that's not really "free" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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See? Copyright has its limits (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure Mozart is finally wealthy enough to where having his music in the public domain won't hurt him.
Wait? He's been dead for 215 years? Oh. Nevermind.
Concering copyright of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Hardly free (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with the site that
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What do you mean? Click on "Search the NMA Online", and they give you a list of volumes. Click on the volume to expand it. Once you're looking at a list of individual works and movements, click on the Adobe logo to get a PDF file. Where's the difficulty?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And
Re:A+ (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A+ (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, the proper phrase is that you want someone else's information to be free. Information doesn't want anything.
Re:A+ (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A+ (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:A+ (Score:4, Funny)
Great... a one character typo, and now I've got a mental picture of Linus in the middle of a battlefield wielding a big-ass hammer. Thanks a lot.
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Re:Give the RIAA time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Give the RIAA time (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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