My dad once said to me, "There's no better deal than buying sheet music." This is still true. I recently purchased a Peters Edition of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Looking at this and listening to Glenn Gould perform the piece really inspired me to get back some of my "Classical" chops. All for about $20. (The CD cost me $1. Amazingly, I found it in a Salvation Army bin!)
All this said, there is a place for open source sheet music for editions and compositions that have passed into public domain. One of those places is The Mutopia Project, where you can find a PDF and a MIDI file all sorts of music, such as the second fugue in The Well Tempered Keyboard.
If you followed that link, you may have noticed that you can also download the LilyPond file. What's that? It's one of the things that makes me so excited about the site. All the music is written in the GNU Project's LilyPond language. It's a little like HTML, where a simple text file can be rendered as a beautiful graphic. Being a programmer and a musician can having it's advantages!
The thing I like about having the text "source" file for the score is that if I know LilyPond, I can change the way the finished output looks. Take our fugue from above. It is very unadorned, which is good if you're not a beginner and you want to interpret the music on your own. (This is something Peters Edition is good about.)
All this said, there is a place for open source sheet music for editions and compositions that have passed into public domain. One of those places is The Mutopia Project, where you can find a PDF and a MIDI file all sorts of music, such as the second fugue in The Well Tempered Keyboard.
If you followed that link, you may have noticed that you can also download the LilyPond file. What's that? It's one of the things that makes me so excited about the site. All the music is written in the GNU Project's LilyPond language. It's a little like HTML, where a simple text file can be rendered as a beautiful graphic. Being a programmer and a musician can having it's advantages!
The thing I like about having the text "source" file for the score is that if I know LilyPond, I can change the way the finished output looks. Take our fugue from above. It is very unadorned, which is good if you're not a beginner and you want to interpret the music on your own. (This is something Peters Edition is good about.)
We pianists write our fingering and expressions on the paper music. This is fine most of the time, but what if you want to publish an edition yourself? Or say you are a piano teacher who wants her students to have sheet music with her interpretation? Marking up the music each time is tedious. But with a few changes to the text source, the score could look like this:
Since I edited this myself, there's no copyright on it. I'm free to email a PDF to my friend or, as I did here, make a PNG picture of it and post it on a website. If you wanted to know how this sounds and you're not a pianist, you could create a MIDI file from the source. Or, like the people at Mutopia, you could find old, public domain editions and make them available to everyone.
How about custom piano lessons?
How about custom piano lessons?
If this doesn't sound exciting to you, that's okay. We programmers just like to compile things.
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