Complete Mozart Works Now Free

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."

Mozardot

Are you sure it isn't the Slashdot effect???

Nope..It's lots of fans!

The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity.

One of my cousins works with the NMA. He's currently out in Germany. It was amazing how QUICKLY news got out, and their servers were bogged down like crazy (and still are). They have had to temporarily get several new colos up. In the first couple of hours alone, there was a transfer of something like fifteen terabytes. That's WELL more than the usual monthly average!

Re:Nope..It's lots of fans!

Please tell him that if there was ever a use for BitTorrent, this would be it.

archive.org can be considered too.

Perhaps they also ought to consider uploading to The Internet Archive [archive.org] which would help them offload the bandwidth burden. The Internet Archive carries a wide variety of works under a variety of licenses.

Re:archive.org can be considered too.

As a musician, let me tell you that music is not like software. This music is truly free because, well, you don't need to buy it. There is nothing in the license that says you cannot perform it; there is nothing in the license that says you cannot charge people to listen to your performance. For what it is, a publication of sheet music for free, it is an amazing thing because sheet music is usually a very expensive thing. Additionally, the editing house that produced this edition (Bärenreiter) is almost universally regarded as the best and is therefore the most expensive. The complete score for the Mozart requiem (something I use only because I need to pick one up) normally costs 120.00 euros. That is a fat wad of cash, and now something I don't need to spend.

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.

Re:Nope..It's lots of fans!

Meanwhile, the webmaster for Salieri250thBirthday.org is still waiting for his hit-counter to go into triple digits, and plotting a DOS attack on Mozarteum.at.

Re:Mozardot

What they really need is an LC notch filter to isolate their fundamental frequency.

A+

Damn straight, information wants to be free!

Re:A+

But producers of information still need to get paid.

Re:A+

You're missing the point! The scores have been set free in a victory against the RIAA! Now all I have to do is organise my own orchestra and I'm really going to be sticking it to the man...

Re:A+

Meh. It's like saying that water seeks its own level. It's just a way of saying that it runs downhill. Information wants to be free in that it spreads and spreads, but is very difficult to either keep from spreading, or to pull back, once it's gotten out. It has nothing to do with price, particularly, other than that it tends to spread more when it's free.

Re:A+

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.

Re:A+

If Linus Thorvalds provides Linux for all of mankind...

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.

Slashdot effect..

The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity.

And now they're going to have to increase them again...

Sheet music only?

Can you download the music files also? If so, where are the links?

Re:Sheet music only?

You got the fucking code, compile it yourself.

Re:Sheet music only?

That's /dev/violin, you noob.

Re:Sheet music only?

wget -r -l 0 -np -Ajpg http://dme.mozarteum.at/ [mozarteum.at]; gocr *.jpg | txt2midi | mid2mp3 | mpg123 Aw yea

MIDIs can sound great!

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:
http://www.classicalarchives.com/main/s.html#SAINT -SAENS [classicalarchives.com]

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.

Re:Sheet music only?

I wasn't aware that gocr by default translated musical scores into text. I'd expect lots of random letters if it attempted to parse those scores.

Re:Sheet music only?

Wait... Even if that worked...

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...

It's a compiler, so

/usr/bin/violin

Re:Sheet music only?

You got the fucking code, compile it yourself.

Thanks. Orange Juice almost squirted out of my nose.

Re:Sheet music only?

Thanks. Orange Juice almost squirted out of my nose

It was milk for me. The disturbing part is that I wasn't drinking at the time.

Re:Sheet music only?

If you want classical mp3s Classic Cat [classiccat.net] has a large selection of recordings of many composers' works. I believe it is all free and legal. Lot of good stuff.

Plenty of public-domain Mozart scores

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.

-wb-

Completed Mozart Now Works For Free?

They finally finished reassembling him, eh? And he creates new works without charging a penny, eh?? EXCELLENT!

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?

Heck, I'd be satified if he finished his Requiem Mass...

Re:Completed Mozart Now Works For Free?

Unfortuantely, the newly animate corpse has actually been destroying many of his works. Mozart has been busy decomposing.

Suggestions

The news article doesn't link to the site but has a link to the Amazon boxed set. Why aren't they using bit torrent? The site is a UI disaster. It's unclear how to find actual music.

weirdest torrent ever?

Probably not, but... okay, weirdest non-porn torrent ever?

Re:weirdest torrent ever?

I once saw a torrent composed of hundreds of pie recipes. That beats out Mozart easily.

Re:weirdest torrent ever?

at ThePierateBay, duh.

Konquerer

Don't bother trying to get in with Konquerer. Holy mis-rendering Batman!

Rock Me Amadeus

So does this mean I can download Falco's stuff without legal issues now? :)

other options

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 Mutopia [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 various sites that will let you download scans for free [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. Uh ... fair use is an exception to copyright. Hell, I can copy a Britney Spears CD and call it fair use.

that's not really "free"

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.

Re:that's not really "free"

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.

Re:that's not really "free"

It is not a trivial problem to resurrect a computer game that has been out of print for ten years. What do you suppose happens when the "source code" and secondary resources are over two hundred years old ?

This is exactly the problem that copyright law is supposed to prevent!!!

That's not really "free"... On the other hand...

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.

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.

See? Copyright has its limits

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.

German Musicians...

Cute message from the site: "NOTE: We are overvelmed by the resonance of this website. We regret any delays in accessing this site and are working on expanding our server capacities"

Mozart + Hilton + Britney = Party Ethics?!

Did anyone find it funny that underneath the article on Mozart's year long birday party that there's an article [reuters.com] of Paris Hilton defending Britney's "party ethics"? I think those over-sexed party girls need some Mozart to calm them down.

Very good because most Mozart on p2p networks...

...had too many notes.

Concering copyright of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe

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.

Unrefined Musician

Quick -- copies to the Unrefined Musician [slashdot.org]!

Moo

This story is music to my ears.

Mozart was considered a genius, by people we consider geniuses. This is definitely something to checkout.