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Finding Digital Scans of Sheet Music? 109

Posted by Cliff from the why-not-we-scan-everything-else dept.
Crymson asks: "I've been trying to find a repository of sheet music out on the web. I'm mostly interested in Classical, although scores for Brass pieces would be nice. I'm sure with Google digitizing all the books of the world, someone must be digitizing all of the sheet music. I don't want special viewers, and I don't want to pay out the nose for music that *may* be what I'm looking for. Where is a decent repository of free sheet music?"
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Finding Digital Scans of Sheet Music? More

Finding Digital Scans of Sheet Music?

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  • Copyright is copyright (Score:5, Informative)

    by hedronist ( 233240 ) * on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:16PM (#16601620)
    Good luck. The copyright on sheet music is the same as for other works. If published before 1923, it's in the public domain, between 1922 and 1978, 95 years from publication date, after that, it's life of author + 70 years.

    In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

    For more authoritative info, google on "length of copyright" and "sheet music", or see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter0/0-a.html [stanford.edu]

    • Re:Copyright is copyright (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:25PM (#16601754) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, and it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is. Yes, that's right, the actual way the printing company formats the score and arranges it on the page is copyrightable. So what are you going to do, track down an ancient piece of parchment and scan that? No. The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score, preferably from memory, then put it under a permissive license. Just be sure to note that you're not claiming copyright over the public domain work, otherwise your copyright will be easily challenged. Putting the whole thing into the public domain might be possible.. although I suppose you could be sued for negligence if you made a mistake in your transcription.

      • Re:Copyright is copyright (Score:5, Interesting)

        by westlake ( 615356 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @06:01PM (#16602212)
        Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is. Yes, that's right, the actual way the printing company formats the score and arranges it on the page is copyrightable. So what are you going to do, track down an ancient piece of parchment and scan that? No. The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score, preferably from memory, then put it under a permissive license. Just be sure to note that you're not claiming copyright over the public domain work.

        You are assuming that there have been no changes in musical notation since Bach and that there are no other significant problems in preparing a score suitable for modern performance.

        If you are listening to a performance of Bach, it is almost certainly an orchestra's unique (and copyrighted?) interpretation of the work, and not an attempt at a mechanical, note-by-note, transcription of the score in manuscript.

      • Re:Copyright is copyright (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Frodrick ( 666941 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @06:42PM (#16602710)

        it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is.

        I have a fairly major credibility issue with that statement. Could you cite some sources for your assertion? - (Not including music publishers, of course)

        My understanding of copyright law is that it requires a certain amount of creativity before something is considered copyrightable. Rewriting and reformating just isn't enough. I would normally expect that public domain music would only be freshly copyrightable IF enough new work had been added to justify adding the new publisher's name to the "Composed by" line.

        There are a number of content middlemen (Music, video, sheet music) out there who are under the impression that every time they reissue the same work, copyright begins anew. They are wrong.

        Everyonce in a while, a publisher will attempt to render public domain material copyrightable by introducing a deliberate error. Then they claim that copiers have infringed their copyrights on the errors. When challenged, this, too, fails the necessary "creativity" test for copyrightability.

        "not score program, they probably copyright the output of it"

        Not possible. While the program remains copyright, of course, the copyright of the output belongs solely to the author. I have used some of these programs; they allow you to set your own copyright notices.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Haven't you heard? Intellectual property issues are just one of many things that the C++ coders and 14-year olds that comprise the Slashdot reader base pretend to be authorities on. I'm also intensely interested to learn about this mysterious "how the notes are printed" copyright on public domain music.

          Public domain books certainly don't share the same characteristic--it is only meaningful additions to those works, such as annotations, that are subject to copyright under Section 103(b) of the U.S. Code. [cornell.edu]

          • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

            by QuantumG ( 50515 )
            If you don't like it, don't read the site dickhead.

            • If you don't like it, don't read the site dickhead.

              I'll stop reading when you and people like you stop trying to frame your poor understanding of intellectual property laws as the authoritative truth. Pretending to be an authority on something that you obviously don't understand only serves to perpetuate misunderstanding of intellectual property issues, in the Slashdot community and elsewhere.

              Where you have attempted to help, you instead do harm. People will now read your "+4 Insightful" comment and think

          • While your skepticism is taken, I have been interested in this issue for many years, and while I do not have specific case law, I make the observations:
            • several public domain music sites share this interpretation, presumably after doing their legal homework. See the Mutopia Project's page about legal issues [mutopiaproject.org], and a similar page at CPDL [cpdl.org]. Since it is in these sites' interest to distribute, the fact that they share this interpretation does not bode well for a more liberal reading.
            • As a musician, every modern
          • >>> "The term "original" also involves a test of substantiality - literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works will not be original if there has not been sufficient skill and labour expended in their creation. But, sometimes significant investment of resources without significant intellectual input can still count as sufficient skill and labour."

            See http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/c-applies/c-original .htm [patent.gov.uk]

            >>>"Published editions of literary works such as magazines, anthologies of poems and
        • Here's something [gutenberg.org] that somewhat goes along with what he's saying, but it's different in slightly subtle ways.

          The sheet music may very well be copyrighted due to small, even minor, variations that the publisher put in it. Not so much the formatting, though I suspect in some more extreme cases (i.e., not just changing the font and page width) that the new work could be copyrighted. So all that needs to happen is that a publisher get a hold of Bach's original work, or at least some old copy of it, change a

          • Tricky wording (Score:3, Informative)

            by BeeBeard ( 999187 )
            Good resource, but make sure you don't misunderstand this statement from that linked FAQ:

            The problem with these practices is that a publisher, having added this copyrighted material, or edited the text even in a minor way, may simply put a copyright notice on the whole book, even though the main part of it -- the text itself -- is in the public domain!

            (emphasis added)

            That "may" that I bolded DOES NOT MEAN that the publisher has a legally enforceable new copyright (i.e. it doesn't mean "may" as in "they ar

          • The sheet music may very well be copyrighted due to small, even minor, variations that the publisher put in it. Not so much the formatting, though I suspect in some more extreme cases (i.e., not just changing the font and page width) that the new work could be copyrighted.

            Deliberate errors in the work introduced for the purpose of making the work copyrightable do not meet the necessary creativity test. Nor do any formatting changes, punctuation, or spelling changes, such as changing British to American spe

            • Deliberate errors surely would not count, but in the case of music, changing a measures for the bass line would qualify. However, the copyright would only apply to the new work, not the old. The problem is that finding the old work becomes difficult and we are left with only the new work which has a copyright notice on the front. That is where Project Gutenberg comes in. They find works with a clear Title Page which has a copyright notice that has obviously expired and then they publish it in the public
            • That may be, but deliberate errors are commonly used to prove an infringement of copyright. For example, map makers are known to do this [straightdope.com].

              I actually bumped into this first-hand back in my college days - I was flipping through an ADC map and noticed a road way in the middle of nowhere named "Pink Floyd Road". So, of course, my buddy and I decided to drive out there to see whether *ahem* one of the street signs might have fallen off the post. Alas, after 45 minutes of driving in circles around corn field

              • For example, map makers are known to do this"

                Map makers have been known to try it. So have telephone companies in their phone books and just about anyone else who compiles public databases that are essentialially just lists of facts.

                Usually these attempts fail if they ever get to court because lists of facts are not creative. Most times, however, the little guy will fold when he gets his first corporate lawyer nastygram.

                Note: There has been lobbying by these database producers (phone companies, etc.) to

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by RR ( 64484 )

          it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is.

          My understanding of copyright law is that it requires a certain amount of creativity before something is considered copyrightable.

          My understanding is that a lot of music, especially older than Classical period pieces, do involve a bit of creative work. The source materials are highly fragmentary: They were w

        • My understanding of copyright law is that it requires a certain amount of creativity before something is considered copyrightable.
          I have a fairly major credibility issue with that statement. Could you cite some sources for your assertion? - (Not including music publishers, of course)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ozbird ( 127571 )
        The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score

        Try LilyPond [lilypond.org]: "music notation for everyone."

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by treeves ( 963993 )
          Thanks. It looks hard to use - but free is better than $hundreds for Finale and Sibelius and it looks like it gives more control.
          I'd mod you Informative if I had any mod points now!
      • Couldn't we make some sort of OCR program for music that could scan in the music, and turn it into an actual representation of the notes, and then print that such that it contains the notes, but doesn't contain a scan of the actual copyrighted material It would make it a lot easier to pass the music around if it was just a bunch of notes rather than a huge JPG or tiff. You could probably even feed the file to a midi player and listen to the song.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by QuantumG ( 50515 )
          Basically what you just said was: can't we make an automatic process to turn a non-machine-readable document into a machine-readable document. And the answer almost always is: no, we can't. But I've got a better idea. Instead of OCR, let's just scan 1% of the document into an image. That's fair use right? Ok, so now lets set up a website where we show that 1% to budding young musicians and get them to play it with their midi hardware. Once 10 people have played the same piece of music, let's compare t
          • And now you're all part of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement instead of simple copyright infringement!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by treeves ( 963993 )
          There is such software but it costs $hundreds and the OCR part is TERRIBLE! I'm talking about Sibelius - a good music notation program, and Photoscore (IIRC), it's awful OCR companion. You can download a demo version and try it for yourself. I did, and that's why I have the opinion I have.

      • The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score,

        If you want to typeset a score and avoid having the software place restrictions on the output, there is no need to resort to the pain of using a paint program! Just use some software like MusiXTeX [jpn.org].

        As a matter of fact, it appears that some people have already been doing this and making available some free sheet music. They have an archive [icking-music-archive.org], and

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by QuantumG ( 50515 )
          That's cool, thanks. I suggested they use a paint program simply because something like you suggested is probably a LOT too hard for most musicians to use.. so they're likely to be tempted to use a proprietary program, which despite what the people who replied to my original post will tell you, often do make claims on their output.. for example, they often use custom fonts, which are copyrighted, and therefore you don't have the right to redistribute works written using those fonts.
      • What I generally do is translate somebody else's midi file in Sibelius, and then re save it as a midi, and then print that midi in Finale. I'm pretty sure that means nobody can have any part of my copyright, since I'm completely rewriting the whole score twice, with heavy editing.

        rhY
      • So what are you going to do, track down an ancient piece of parchment and scan that?

        For Bach, there is luckily a very old but reputable edition called Bach Gesellschaft [wikipedia.org]. It was published between 1851 and 1900.

        (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it)

        IANAL, but this is no more likely than MS Word copyrighting the output of your essays, or Photoshop copyrighting your pictures.

        Just be sure to note that you're not claiming copyright over the public domain work, otherwise your copyright will

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by QuantumG ( 50515 )
          Sigh. Most of these score programs use custom fonts. Custom fonts are copyright. You cannot distribute anything that is rendered in a custom font without permission from the creator of that font. Microsoft Word, on the other hand, uses Microsoft fonts, which come with a license that says you are free to distribute works rendered with those fonts but you are not permitted to distribute the fonts for use in third party software. If you use a custom font to add text to an image in Photoshop then you are b
          • Most of these score programs use custom fonts. Custom fonts are copyright. You cannot distribute anything that is rendered in a custom font without permission from the creator of that font.

            What you say is true of all fonts. Your term "custom fonts" doesn't mean anything. All fonts are Copyright (C) their creator, whether they come with the program, or you get them off the internet, or you buy them in a box. However, except in exceptional circumstances, I feel confident in saying that no one would buy a f

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by QuantumG ( 50515 )
              Well, you're just guessing and I've actually read the license, and they do, so shut the fuck up already.
              • The license of what font, obtained from where, and what exactly does the license say? Are you talking about your "custom fonts" or fonts that come with the program itself? You are making vague and unverifiable claims.

    • Re:Copyright is copyright (Score:5, Informative)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:28PM (#16601786)
      If published before 1923. . .

      Like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

      In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

      And in any case, he doesn't actually want scans, even if he doesn't know that. What he wants is music that has been digitally encoded in a free and open standard, so that there are readers the can interepret and print it.

      The basically means ABC and Lilypond files:

      http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/ABC-FAQ.html [mit.edu]

      http://lilypond.org/web/ [lilypond.org]

      KFG

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by WowTIP ( 112922 )
        Lilypond and Mutopia [mutopiaproject.org] should keep him busy for a while...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by supasam ( 658359 )
      Almost none? Like Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, lets just say a shit load of classic kick-ass, right?

      I don't know about brass music, but it seems like SOMETHING should be available. Maybe someone can come up with a sheet-wiki?
    • Your information is correct, although it makes me wonder why there hasn't been any torrent sites that specialize in sheet music. Surely there would be a sizeable user base for such a thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Marsala ( 4168 )

      I don't think he's looking for something that's necessarily free. And even if he isn't, I'm not.

      The fact is that there's nothing analgous to iTunes for sheet music. If you want the music for a contemporary song, then you're stuck having to purchase a whole book filled with other songs just to get the one you're after. Same situation as buying a cd used to be in 1998 was.

      While I'm not so hot on paying $20 for a book of 20 songs when I'm only interested in one, paying $1 20 times for 20 songs I do w

      • I wrote the first post in this sequence, but I feel like I missed an opportunity to talk about how you *can* actually do something like this. I have a good friend, Sarge Gerbode, who, although an apparently mild-mannered man, keeps causing fusses whereever he goes. First he did it by being one of the first persons to stand up to the Church of Scientology *and win in court* (no mean feat), then he did it in the world of Lute Music.

        Lute Music? Yeah, lute music. At his site (http://gerbode.net/) you can find o

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by kaliphonia ( 1018908 )
        Actully there are sites like iTunes for sheet music. http://www.musicnotes.com/ [musicnotes.com] has been around for about 7 or 8 years now and has been working on the iTunes model since before iTunes even existed. They have over 50,000 legally available sheet music downloads avaialable - almost all popular music. If you can't find it there, you probably won't find it anywhere. Plus, you can download individual songs and are not forced to buy a full book (although if you want to buy the book, they sell those as well).
    • theres always the lilypond music...
      http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ [mutopiaproject.org]

  • MusicNotes (Score:5, Informative)

    by DrDitto ( 962751 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:19PM (#16601644)
    www.musicnotes.com [musicnotes.com]is not free, but the site is pretty slick and to my knowledge is the largest online sheet music retailer. They do have some free sheet music, and they have a browser plugin that lets you preview (and play) the music.

  • Check Here (Score:5, Informative)

    by Who235 ( 959706 ) <secretagentx9@ c i a . com> on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:23PM (#16601718)
    This looks interesting [dmoz.org]

    I think you should be able to find something here.

    BTW, GIYF.
  • I mean, I'm just guessing here. But I'd go to a music library.
    • Actually -- that's a pretty good place to look.
      The poster did ask for digital copies - but assuming that s/he would be willing to do the work of scanning/copying the music a Library is a great resource. Most Universities that have a music program will also have a good library of sheet music.

  • Torrents (Score:3, Informative)

    by Conception ( 212279 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:30PM (#16601802)
    Though, not particularly legal, there are sheet music torrent sites out there. I don't really want to name them, obviously, but if you do some research you can find them.

  • Mutopia (Score:5, Informative)

    by lobotomy ( 26260 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:31PM (#16601824)
    Try Mutopia [mutopiaproject.org]. Quote:
    All music in the Mutopia Project is free to download, print out, perform and distribute. There are now 756 pieces of music available!

  • Try Mutopia (Score:4, Informative)

    by brownsteve ( 673529 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:36PM (#16601892) Homepage
    I've found some goodies at the Mutopia Project [mutopiaproject.org]. This website has many out-of-copyright pieces that have been typeset by volunteers and uploaded for all to use. Music is available in PDF, MIDI, and LilyPond [lilypond.org] (an open-source Finale-ish format).
    • Let me assure you I have attempted Lillypond and there is nothing Finaleish about it. Except of course that Finale ALSO sucks compared to Sibelius.

      Not having a decent FOSS score writing program is really discouraging. It seems like it would be a very easy kind of program to write, and would benefit a lot of poorer musicians, both in impoverished areas here in the US, and for impoverished musicians in the third world.

      Having a few good OLPCs and a decent music editing program could really improve music lite
  • I know this doesn't answer your question, but I don't believe there is anything stopping a person from walking to their local library, borrowing a book with the music printed in it, and scanning it.

    I won't even try to guess at the legality/morality of this.

  • I've found a legal loophole. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Scans [blogspot.com] are easy to make legally, as long as it's for eductional purposes.

  • The Sheet Music Archive (Score:5, Informative)

    by JonLatane ( 750195 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:52PM (#16602092) Homepage
    The Sheet Music Archive [sheetmusicarchive.net], ugly as their site may be, has a TON of good public domain, classical music available for free download. They limit your downloads per day with a cookie, but I think a clever-minded individual like yourself could get around that (and if you're not clever, in Firefox, Tools->Options...->Privacy->Show Cookies, search for sheetmusicarchive.net and delete whatever is there). I've used them for years in my piano studies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by osgeek ( 239988 )
      You'd think that they could just mirror the site to a few places... or maybe let Google cache the pdfs.

  • Sheet music sites (Score:2, Informative)

    by fiferjim ( 948078 )
    I use a few sites for sheet music, but mainly http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/ [sheetmusicarchive.net] and http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/scores/ [indiana.edu]. A lot of music publishing companies (Dover's a good example) publish facsimile editions, and keep them in the public domain. So that's where these sites get a lot of their music.

  • Sheet Music Archive (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/ [sheetmusicarchive.net] hosts a ton of free sheet music, but limits you to 2 downloads per day. You can purchase a CD containing the entire archive for $20 USD, however.

  • Some ideas... (Score:5, Informative)

    by CyberZCat ( 821635 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @05:59PM (#16602198)
    http://www.8notes.com/ [8notes.com] looks promising they're free at least. If you want more recent songs, you'll usually have to pay to download them from commercial sites, but you can save and print them right away after paying. http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/ [sheetmusicplus.com] is a good example.

    Another thing you can do is find a midi of what you want to play (use a midi search engine: http://www.musicrobot.com/ [musicrobot.com] or http://www.vanbasco.com/midisearch.html [vanbasco.com] ) and open in a sequencer and print the track(s) you want. Anvil Studio is a free program which can do this. http://www.anvilstudio.com/ [anvilstudio.com]
  • There's a fair amount of misery in the comments for this Ask /.


    It's a bit like Oscar's Orchestra [toonhound.com]... ._. What's the world coming to?

  • Wrong section of the orchestra, perhaps, but Power Tab (http://www.power-tab.net/ [power-tab.net]) renders guitar tablatures as sheet music. Also imports MIDI. The program's free, but last I checked the legality of most of the guitar tab sites was in question...

  • CPDL (Score:1)

    by vandy1 ( 568419 )
    Try the Choral Public Domain Library [cpdl.org], which has 8301 scores that a free to use (and counting). Of course, the fact that it's PD music means that there's nothing prior to 1923... But that works well enough for me, Purcell et al died many, many years ago :)

    Cheers,

    Michael
  • I've played classical my whole life, and recently tried to find some music online for free. There is some material available, but what I've seen doesn't yet come close to a good edition (Barenreiter, Henle, etc.). If you're going to be spending more than a few hours on the pieces, then you should invest in a good (and probably copyrighted) edition. Unless you're sightreading for a gig or something, you'll probably be spending countless hours with the music you buy, so the cost is low for the amount of time

  • Maybe we could host some? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ankh ( 19084 ) * on Thursday October 26, 2006 @06:52PM (#16602818) Homepage
    I experimentally put a couple of pages of sheet music on fromoldbooks.org [fromoldbooks.org] yesterday. I'm not sure how useful they are, but I'm contemplating adding a lot more out-of-copyright sheet music.

    I'd be willing to host good quality scans from other people, too, but it has to be demonstrably out of copyright -- I'm not interested in "legal loopholes" here. I'd suggest using 1200dpi greyscale and then adjusting "curves" to make a clear, sharp image. Both the music and the typeset score must be out of copyright, as well as the lyrics. In the US and Canada this is generally easy to determine, but for music produced in other countries it can be arbitrarily difficult; anything printed before 1820 or so is pretty safe though.

    This doesn't really help the original poster very much unless I happen to have some specific piece of music, of course!

  • The Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) is a repository of editions of music in the public domain. www.cpdl.org/
  • Where is a decent repository of free sheet music?

    Easy - try you local Public Library. Heck, you can probably search their catalog online, just to maintain that required eek element,
  • Will the scorch plug-in from Sibelius work for you? Sounds like it's pretty much designed for what you're looking for.
    http://www.sibelius.com/products/scorch/index.html [sibelius.com]
    http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/ [sibeliusmusic.com]

  • Free-Scores.com (Score:2, Informative)

    by dilbert627 ( 561671 )
    http://www.free-scores.com/index_uk.php3 [free-scores.com] This is the best resource I've found. The quality on some is better than others, but they have a pretty good selection of classical pieces.

  • What I'm really looking for... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Crymson4 ( 1018850 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @08:09PM (#16603458)
    Ok, perhaps I wasn't overly clear in the original post - what I'm really looking for are some Trumpet solo pieces that are Renaissance period. I'm active in the SCA (medieval re-enactment) and while I know that the trumpet wasn't present in its current form, it's what I know how to play. So, I'd like to find some period pieces that I cna play by myself. Most of the classical stuff I find is for strings, or full arrangements for an orchestra. I'm interested simply in trumpet solo pieces. Does that help narrow it down any? Thanks for the replies so far!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by vandy1 ( 568419 )
      Well, plugging "trumpet public domain" into Google gets me a page of trumpet pieces from the mutopia project [mutopiaproject.org], but the thing is the most prolific authors of trumpet pieces were not renaissance - and the later ones are, by most people, considered far more grandiose. I would instead recommend you visit a conservatorium library to find what you want.

      Cheers,

      Michael
      • Interesting find, thank you! That's been helpful. I'll expand my search, and see what I can come up with.
    • I have not been active in music for a while now, but when I played renaissance music on the recorder, a friend of mine was downloading MIDI files by the boatload of renaissance pieces for the cornetto, the ancient ancestor of modern horns. He would then convert the MIDI to a printable score.

      Perhaps it's easier to find the MIDI file of a piece you're looking for than the actual score?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gymell ( 668626 )
      I'm not into the SCA myself, but I am into early music including early brass. There aren't going really to be trumpet solos from the Renaissance for a couple of reasons. For one thing, much of the secular instrumental music (aside from keyboard and lute) prior to the Baroque period wasn't notated, because music notation was still developing and many people couldn't read music. The invention of the printing press certainly helped in that regard, but that music tended to be geared more toward vocal, sacred, o
      • Yeah, I've noticed that the traditional trumpet didn't exist, so I've been trying to find "brass" in general - not fanfareish, but things that I could make work. Your suggestion of the Cornetto is a good idea, I'll look in to that. Thanks for the rest of the great info!
  • Doesn't have everything, yet...
    http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ [mutopiaproject.org] Has quite a few public domain transcriptions of classical music. In many file formats to boot, eh!
  • It's not ethical but I've found that a lot of sheet music can be found on limewire.
  • The Library of Congress has some American items online, here are the home page [loc.gov] and the music collection [loc.gov].

  • Score (Score:3, Informative)

    by bellyjean ( 1018896 ) on Thursday October 26, 2006 @09:43PM (#16604140)
    Pianofiles [pianofiles.com]
  • www.gamingforce.com

    Registration required, but once registered, the forum "The Concert Hall" under the heading "Gamingforce Audio" is *the* place to find interesting sheet music.

    Also performance videos.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Quoting your tagline:

      --
      With spending like this [twu.net/cct [twu.net]], just what are "conservatives" conserving? (Homophobia?)

      The answer is: Their own social positions.

      Conserving homophobia would probably earn them too much money, as well. Like smoking, homosexuality can prove very expensive in, well, odd little ways. Too easy to justify mean/nasty stuff against the savings.

      It's also a bit too definite for conservatives. Fingers can be pointed, innocence can be cast aside, scarey stuff. Especially because your own f
  • There are multiple copyrights in a piece of music.

    The tune in itself is copyrighted, and the words (if there are any) exist under a separate copyright of their own. So you could, for instance, sing Hal David's words to a tune of your own invention and not owe Burt Bacharach anything. There was a fad in the 1980s to set new words to the tunes of advertising jingles, turning them into crappy love songs. And at least one record has had to be re-released with the words sung to a different tune; it was some

  • Werner Icking Music Archive (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://icking-music-archive.org/ [icking-music-archive.org]

    hth
  • You might check out the Sheet Music Consortium [ucla.edu]. This is an effort by music libraries at UC Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University to digitize much of their public domain sheet music. Also includes links to other on-line sheet music.
  • Back in the day when midi's were popular I discovered that it was somewhat trivial to open up a midi file with a score based midi editor, transcribe whichever part I wanted to my instrument of choice and press 'print'. Midi files are common enough that you can easily find a midi of any song ever and they're not subject to legal problems like digital images of the actual score or mp3s.
  • alt.binaries.sheet-music
  • Visit http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/ [delcamp.net] and become a member, you need to make some posts to "win" the right to download. The prof has put up 848 Works (2116 pages) of Classical sheet music in pdf format ranging from absolute beginner to performance level pieces. Many have associated MP3s and the site has an area to post your own efforts for critique. The music is arranged specifically for classical guitar, but it's worth mentioning. Good helpful community too.

  • Project Gutenberg collects sheet music [gutenberg.org]. Unfortunately they don't have much available yet, and little of it is brass music. The number of renaissance trumpet solo pieces is essentially nil, sorry about that. :-)

    I've had some luck hunting MIDI files on the net and cleaning them up for printing in Sibelius or Finale. Unfortunately it requires a lot of work as most songs must be rearranged to suit the ensemble. I've done this mostly on vocal music (renaissance mixed quartet) and classic jazz. The trick is to

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