In light of Q2 posting Circles and Lines’ latest concert on their Live Concert Series broadcast page and linking to my website, I thought I’d speak a little bit about how the mission of this website has changed over the few years it has been around. When I originally started posting on this website, most of the online databases of free, out of copyright music were hopeless. IMSLP had just gotten back up and running around the time I began this site after it had struggled through a period of dealing with DMCA take down notices and other copyright issues and other vital websites like mutopia are kind of crappy in design and interface. Not only that, but the scores that IMSLP and other websites had acquired were not very useful to actively performing musicians (but incredibly useful to scholars). What I mean by this, is that players couldn’t get their hands on many orchestral parts, or solo repertoire that had been written before the US copyright-public domain border.
What I intended to do, was explore libraries and with a notebook scanner, scan works that were of a more practical use (to most players) than Scarletti’s nth trio sonata. I figured that damaged, or written on parts could be digitally cleaned (I actually ended up doing this with a particularly dirty version of Bartok’s 1st String Quartet that IMSLP had hosted).
At first, I was going to throw up this word press blog, just as a way to give the fruits of my “meanwhile efforts” someplace to go while I learned PHP and other database management languages. The plan was to create a better version of IMSLP that would also function as a social network (this idea hasn’t totally been put to rest, but it has for this particular domain), hence the “Opensourcemusic”. But as time wore on and the resources that other websites had at their disposal, whether it be man-power or knowledge, far surpassed mine, and my performing and composing took more time of my life, I shifted the focus of this blog to be more personal. That’s why you’ll see more of my thinking and reacting in mostly uninformed ways on this website than masses of sheet music links.