Open Scores

Beethoven Symphony No.3

2009-04-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't finished it yet, but I have decided to work on it a little more diligently. In the past I've mostly worked on it when I was tired with other things and needed a change. Lately I've finished the two violin parts and I've made some headway on the viola part. These three are probably the most dense parts notewise. I've received many fixes to the bassoon parts from another contributor for which I am very grateful. Still to do are the cello (which shares quite a lot with the bass part which is already done), oboe, clarinet and bassoon parts need to be entered. After that it will just be a lot of editing and tweaking. Adding cue notes will be a large effort so I'll probably leave them out at first and encourage people to suggest cues and consult the B&H parts when they become available at IMSLP.

(Working on a simple orchestral parts is a very good way to learn Lilypond. Not much tweaking is necessary to get good results and there is usually only one voice at a time so note entry is simple. If you want to help finish a part let me know!)

Yes We Scan!

2009-02-25T20:58:00.000-07:00

I didn't even know the United States had a Government Printing Office. From their faq: "GPO is the Federal Government’s primary centralized resource for gathering, cataloging, producing, providing, authenticating, and preserving published information in all its forms."

It seems that Carl Malamud is campaigning to become the head of the GPO. He's done some wonderful work to promote and protect the public domain in the United States. For example, the decisions of the Federal Courts of the United States have not been accessible for years (expensive and not digitized). He has worked to digitize them and put them online for free through his non-profit public.resource.org. Another example: California has been attempting to claim copyright over the law (the state makes a lot of money charging people to look at the law it seems). Through public.resource.org the California Code of Regulations has been placed online freely available.

He's done good work and it would be great to see him as the head of the GPO. Here's my endorsement.

Yes We Scan!

Two pieces added to Mutopia

2008-10-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

Reverie by Glazunov and Nocturno by Franz Strauss were added today. Enjoy.

Also the wrong note in the violin part for the Mozart Horn Quintet (pointed out here by soutaro) has been fixed. It took me long enough.

Copyright

2008-08-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

(I am not a lawyer. Below is just how I understand the law. It's also and exercise to help me understand it better.)

I just read Bruce Hembd's lastest blog post. Near the beginning he briefly mentions weak copyright laws in the time of Stravinsky. While I can somewhat appreciate that copyright laws near the beginning of the 20th century (when Stravinsky was publishing) did not perhaps protect the authors rights enough, our current laws do not protect the rights of the user or society enough. Copyrights exists for the advancement of "science and useful arts" (From the US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 8). The current laws of life+50 (Canada), life+70 (EU), publication+95 (US sort of), life+100 (Mexico) and others do little to accomplish both goals of encouraging individual creation and progressing the state of the art. Essentially copyrights last forever for the author.

Copyright limits at the turn of the century I think provided a good deal of protection... if the country you lived in was part of the Berne Convention. (See the Berne Convention). Since Russia did not sign the Berne Convention Russian, works were essentially public domain in countries which didn't have treaties with Russia (see here). Also what happened to copyrights during the Russian revolution was very bad for Russian copyright holders. Stravinsky was smart to attempt making new editions to overcome this, but it was just futile at that point to try and bring it back under copyright. International copyright was weak because the new Soviet, the old Russian, US, and other governments didn't always recognize the copyrights of others. Today I think copyright law is mostly fine in this aspect. Unfortunately these laws keep going further and further in how and what they protect until you have the mess that we have today.

Videos on Copyright:
A Fair(y) Use Tale
Larry Lessig TED Talk

UPDATE:
I just noticed the link to Stravinsky's Copyright Blues by Michael Tilson Thomas. One thing I found interesting was that throughout the story Stravinsky was fighting the unfair public domain-ness of his early works then suddenly at the end copyright law is biting him from the other side for his inadvertent use of copyrighted melodies.

Side tracked

2008-08-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Since IMSLP has opened back up I've been a bit side tracked with adding some pieces there (Schantl Horn Etudes, Danzi Horn Sonata, and a few others). I had a few minutes tonight so I decided to satisfy my "Le Basque" itch. IMSLP has a proper public domain edition to use as the source. I've just committed the solo part and transposed it for horn. Hopefully I'll be able to add the piano part (and of course the viola part from the source) in the coming months for submittal to Mutopia.

Wiki @ GitHub

2008-06-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

I started using the wiki feature at github. All there is now is the list of pieces with the Mutopia links. It's useful to me when I want to find a piece I submitted quickly.

Also in my Le Basque searchings I found a fun little video of a recorder and flute going back and forth playing it:

Wine Works!

2008-05-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

I've run linux full time for a number of years (Ubuntu Hardy currently). I've tried out wine in the past, but it never quite worked. I had the most amazing experience a couple minutes ago. I was wanting to look at the music for Marin Marias's Le Basque. I found a copy here. It was a noteworth composer file. I tried to use some of the nwc to lilypond converters without success. So I figured I was going to have to fire up vmware to view it. I decided to give wine a try for kicks: sudo apt-get install wine. I downloaded the nwc viewer and double clicked on it. It installed perfectly and added an entry to the wine menu. It ran perfectly opened Le Basque perfectly, printed it perfectly and even played the midi perfectly. I'm quite impressed.

Bach B Minor Mass

2008-04-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

I'm about ready to submit the bass aria "Quoniam tu solus sanctus" to Mutopia. It, of course, contains a very well known horn solo. I've studied it in the past, but I've never really known the context. The horn player has to sit around for a very long time before this movement (This quiz says approximately 45 minutes). The orchestration is horn, bass, two bassoons, and basso continuo. I had always assumed that it was a bit larger for some reason. Here's Hermann Baumann playing on youtube:

Oboe, Horn, Piano Trios

2008-04-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

I have a sister that plays the oboe and two other sisters which play the piano so I've been researching a bit lately on the repertoire for oboe, horn and piano. There are quite a few nice pieces out there. This paper is a really good overview. So what's available online? Here's what I've found:

Adolphe Blanc: Romance, Op.43
Robert Kahn: Serenade, Op.73
Carl Reinecke: Trio, Op.188 (Was available at IMSLP)

From the paper above there are a few public domain pieces which I didn't find: The two Duvernoy trios, Hermann Heinrich Trio-Suite, Op.23, Heinrich von Herzogenberg Trio Op.61, and Heinrich Molbe Air Arabe. (What's with all the Heinrich's) I have a recording of the Herzogenberg and it is a very nice piece.

At the Sibley Music Library there are a couple with close instrumentation:

I'm hoping by the end of this year to get my braces off my teeth and start playing my horn again so I can try some of these out. I've about finished putting into lilypond the Blanc piece and I've started on the Reinecke (oboe, and horn parts are done). They are available at the git repository.

Git

2008-03-18T21:47:00.000-07:00

I'm a software developer by day so I'm more used to using version control than most people. I think version control is important. You can look at earlier versions, tag important versions, manage multiple concurrent versions, and do a whole lot of other things. Sourceforge offers a couple choices: cvs and subversion. Both of these follow the centralized model of version control which has some disadvantages. For most operations (looking at history, committing new code, branching, etc.) a connection to the repository is needed. I've been playing with git a bit lately through github. Instead of a centralized repository when you checkout the code it clones the whole repository. This means that if you want to make your own changes and commit them no internet connection is needed. You can work in your own area until you think you're done while retaining a version history. This lowers the cost of entry. If you want to play with it check out the open-scores repository. I'm really not doing anything fancy with it, but it's nice to play with something different.

Mozart Horn Quintet

2008-03-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Mozart's Horn Quintet K.407 was recently released on Mutopia. Let me know any errors that you see. I used Breitkopf & Härtel Complete Works of Mozart as the source. One thing that I know needs work is the page turn situation. In almost all the parts there is one line from the first movement sticking out onto the third page. Lilypond is getting much better at picking spots for page turns, but when I turn this feature on I get blank pages which I don't really want. In any case enjoy!

Dukas Villanelle

2008-02-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

I want to describe the status of each piece. What better one to start with than the Villanelle. This is probably the most complete and polished piece in Open Scores. I recently received a few more comments on some missing marks. Looking through it a bit more I also found some incorrect articulation marks. I think the horn part is fairly usable. The main thing that I'd want to know now is how usable the piano part is. As I'm not a piano player I don't have a good idea of what changes would be helpful. If you choose to use this edition let me know how the piano part works out and what changes would be useful.

Start

2008-02-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

Open Scores is a Sourceforge project I started a couple years ago to be a work area for typesetting scores using Lilypond. Once in a usable state Mutopia would release them. It has a good start in projects. Most are horn pieces or just horn parts right now. I'd like to diversify eventually. I want to use this space to talk about what I'm doing.

Lately I've going back through some horn parts I did years ago. They needed some updating and I'm making the score outlines so other parts can be added more easily along side. I believe I only have the horn parts from Brahms's Academic Festival Overture left to do.

Other than that I've received some more good comments on Dukas's Villanelle. The horn part has been mostly fixed, but the piano part still needs some work.

Cheers!