Complete Mozart Works Now Free 304
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."
Nope..It's lots of fans! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mozardot (Score:2, Informative)
Konquerer (Score:4, Informative)
other options (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Suggestions (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with the site that I think is causing confusion is the fact that it is in German at first (though you can switch to the English version). Otherwise, play around with it a bit and it works fairly well. I'm sure they can improve on the UI though... but that's not the most important thing by any stretch.
Re:Sheet music only? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nope..It's lots of fans! (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Mozart + Hilton + Britney = Party Ethics?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mozart + Hilton + Britney = Party Ethics?! (Score:3, Informative)
And if you believe that Amadeus is representative of fact (which it probably is not, but is an entertaining play/movie in any event), then Mozart serves as more of a model for Paris Hilton's and Brittney Spears' current behavior than anything else. A genius... and a party animal!
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Suggestions (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:other options (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, arrangements for particular instrument groupings, etc.), and many are duplications (the same work arranged for different instrument groupings).
What's more exciting is that these are high quality, authentic scores for original instrumentation. That's hard to find, even if you're prepared to pay top dollar. And consider that a symphony or voilin concerto complete score (all orchestral parts plus soloist) is likely to set you back many hundreds of dollars -- just for a single opus.
As a violinist, for me this is just truly wonderful news. Oh, if only t'were true of more composers. Dare we hope? Hmmm Beethoven's 250th birthday is 2020.
archive.org can be considered too. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This was on AskMeFi earlier today. (Score:3, Informative)
As for it being hard work, so what? Copyright is interested in originality, not hard work. An original limerick written in thirty seconds is copyrightable, but a book of uncreatively selected and arranged facts that took a lifetime to produce is not copyrightable.
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.
Re:Nope..It's lots of fans! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:archive.org can be considered too. (Score:3, Informative)
For a truly free edition of Mozart's public domain works, we'll have to wait until older editions are scanned at the libraries. But it's going to happen.
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-
No wonder the site is bogged down (Score:3, Informative)
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 is not easy [uspto.gov], but the result really doesn't got to be this bad.
Re:Sheet music only? (Score:3, Informative)
(I am not affiliated with Myriad Online.)
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.