As an early music specialist (Baroque, plucked strings), it should be noted that for performers like us who prefer to read from primary sources, having original manuscripts from the Baroque and Renaissance periods available on IMSLP has revolutionized our field. It is only going to get better in the future, as more people upload the scans of music manuscripts held across the various libraries around the world. If you prefer to study and perform from primary sources, as we do, IMSLP is an excellent place to start your research.
Do you read directly from the manuscripts, or do you transcribe them into more legible formats for playing? As a violinist I find historical handwritten manuscripts incredibly hard to sightread compared to modern engraving, but I'm curious if that's something you can get good at with practice.
I specialize in 18th-century Scottish music and generally find that the hand-engraved copperplate printing from the 18th-century produces more readable music than modern editions. I also play stuff like Corelli sonatas (easy to read) from facsimiles and Playford tunes (17th century, woodblock printing) from facsimiles. The Playford is fine for me, but I'd understand it if people wanted to transcribe it.
I used to play with a Renaissance group that played ca. 1500 music (published by Petrucci himself!) and they transcribed it into urtexts, which I appreciated. Two big factors in that were a) using more comfortable clefs b) turning something written in parts into a score. It's helpful to see what the harmonic situation is, and playing off a score makes that much easier.
It's interesting that music notation has taken a long time for computer generated music to be as readable as good hand copy. And the people I know who do it by computer tell me that it's a lot of work to go from basic data entry to a readable layout. This becomes apparent reading jazz band charts in a hazy bar.
Also, chord symbols are possibly the only respectable use of Comic Sans!
Non musical outsider here. Ive heard this kind of claim before, that older typeset documents just have a look about them that is better. IIRC Knuth said it about old mathematical texts, and I vaguely recall the creators of GNU Lilypond writing it about sheet music.
Can you comment on what good sheet music typesetting looks like, or is it something intangible that you just "know it when you see it"?
Amusingly, it's about the controversy over whether the chord changes are accurate or not. Now, this style has heavily influenced how jazz "lead sheets" are typeset as well. For instance Chuc Sher's "New Real Book" has a section in the foreword about how they studied the script of the old Real Book before starting their own project.
Notice that the chord symbols are much smaller -- nobody can bring themselves to make the font big enough for some reason. The melody is broken up into awkward groups of 3, 4, and 5 measures. And so forth. It's like trying to write a poem with word wrap turned on.
The typical workflow for a jazz chart was that the composer / arranger wrote a score with all of the parts, and sent it to a copyist, who wrote out the individual parts for use by the band. The copyist earned repeat business by the quality of their work.
I find that it's useful to have a "clean" score (urtext if possible), but also have the primary source available for cross-referencing if you want to really know what the composer penned. A study of the primary score is often useful in tandem with an edition.
Yep, in most situations it is my preference to read directly from the manuscripts. I specialize in the 13 course Baroque lute and overall we are used to reading handwritten tablature as this was the primary notation for this instrument which predates the widespread adoption of modern notation. Because of the rarity of our instrument and its notation, it is often the case that there are no modern editions available at all, and even if there are, I tend to not trust the judgement of the editor and prefer to work from the original manuscripts. Because of the fact that the 13 course lute disappeared into more or less complete obscurity after around ~1785, we have been without a robust academic infrastructure to support scholarly research about the instrument for quite a long time- in fact until around the late 20th century, so even with a modern edition, I would venture to say that it would be irresponsible to play solely from it without at least checking the original source.
What is great is that nowadays with an iPad Pro, and Apple pencil, we have an ideal situation to read directly from original manuscripts in full color and in high fidelity. It is especially helpful to have all of the manuscripts in your library and to be able to compare different concordant versions of the same pieces from different manuscripts.
Regarding legibility, yes there are issues. For example, in the Dresden manuscripts, D-Dl Mus. 2841-V-1,1-6, which contain possibly the greatest collection of music by the most prolific composer in the history of the instrument, Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), there is major water damage incurred on many pages as a result of the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 at the end of WWII. With the iPad, the Apple pencil, and the high quality scan from *SLUB, it is possible to draw on a layer directly on top of the manuscript in the ForScore app, and make it legible.
I think there is something to be said for performing directly from the original manuscripts, and in the case of Sylvius Weiss, often from his own handwriting. I personally take comfort in the fact that there is nothing between my interpretation and what the composer left us. There is also a spiritual aspect to the practice of reading from primary sources. I find it somewhat magical to make music directly from the same score that the composer or scribe was using and was left to us.
And because the lute is rather "new" as in very few people are familiar with it, reading through these sources is a bit like being a musical archaeologist. There are so many treasures to be found and aspects of music making that we as modern society have forgotten or are oblivious to. These treasures are sitting in manuscripts of early music across the world, waiting to be found. It is so important to understand just how they made music in the early history of humanity where there was no television, phone, no recorded sound and so forth. There wasn't even an international pitch standard! Studying each stroke of the quill in these manuscripts helps us give insight into their musical and artistic intentions. I believe it leads to better music making, at least for me...
*SLUB = Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek
*Here is sample of one of the good pages from the Dresden MS, Sonata 38 by Weiss: https://ibb.co/72PbHPc
I love this site so much. I've been spending the last few weeks downloading public-domain scores and carefully curating them onto my tablet (awesome tools for PDF reading, if not much else). I've been learning command-line pdf tools so that I can curate/annotate music cores in interesting ways, or append ToC's, or create research versions from multiple editions of the same piece.
My current project (literally this minute) is reducing thousands of pages of Scarlatti into the curated subset that's Vladimir Horowitz' repertoire. As soon as I finish, I'll listen to his album again, with all the scores in one place :)
That sounds like a significant and helpful addition to those scores. Have you tried contacting the Library to see if they could host the changes so they are available for others?
Alternatively maybe even github depending on the legality
I am a professional musician. I use IMSLP all the time. When I practise I use an iPad to store upcoming projects. A lot of the music we play is available there, so instead of scanning the music manually I just download it from IMSLP, with score and everything.
Together with openstreetmap it is my favourite project of all time.
My kids are both music students. Each of them has an iPad and a page turning pedal. Don't know why the adjacent comment was downvoted, but they use ForScore. The music students go through an incredible amount of sheet music, and it's cumbersome to print it out and carry it around. At their recitals, I typically see about 1/2 the kids with iPads, the other 1/2 with paper. It's always Apple, possibly due to the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect, but to be fair the Apple devices do work pretty well.
You can also just reach out and flick the page on the touch screen, not as elegant but more predictable than flipping a printed page -- at least your sheets won't go flying. Managing page turns does get easier with experience, and you learn to prepare your charts -- taping them together, dog-earing them so you can quickly grab a corner, sometimes cutting things apart and rearranging so a page turn happens at a convenient location such as a couple measures of rest.
I'm a jazz musician, and have a Windows tablet, that was a hand-me-down. It only has a 10" screen, making conventional music notation hard to read. It's OK for reading chord symbols. I also have a notebook PC with 14" touch screen, that can operate in tablet mode, so I can lay it open on my music stand. That's a lot more readable, and has full blown computer functionality if I need it, but of course there's the danger of the stand tipping over.
Admittedly I still prefer paper, for one thing it's a lot easier to annotate with a pencil, quickly.
I’m a collaborative pianist by profession (an ‘accompanist’). I use the forScore app as do the vast majority of my colleagues who play from an iPad. The annotation, cataloguing and metadata tools are superb.
MobileSheets Pro for android is pretty nice. It’s not as polished in the UX department as ForScore, but it works really well and IMO it handles complex page sequences better than ForScore.
In typical Android fashion, it exposes a bit too much functionality so it can be overwhelming to a new user.
100% of my colleagues are using ForScore on an iPad for these purposes.
Great feature set, great support, stable, very fast. And page-turning is ultra-fast. If you need that to be hands-free, there are numerous hardware options for that.
Take from a musicologist and semi-professional performer: IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions. Treat it like you might treat Wikipedia as a research source (ok as an initial point of entry, but soon you want to dig into the real sources).
I am working on adding new scores, but in many cases these old things are either the only editions published or the only editions we can take.
IMSLP accepts urtext editions over 25 years old. We have a good amount of these from series for the most famous composers (e.g., Mozart, Bach...) but these are only a minority of the collection. We of course would like to add more.
Otherwise, for "original" editorial editions, as well as arrangements, etc., we take them so long as the contributors of original creative contributors died in 1971 or earlier, or, as the case may be with amateur editions, with permission (note: we actually do have a significant number of quite good editions/arrangements contributed with permission, but we have a lot of files on the site overall).
The other thing is, since we draw from many existing digitizations (such as national libraries), and most of their digitized documents are quite old.
Anyway, we are not really like Wikipedia, since we have a great deal of those primary sources on our site (incl. many autograph mss., as well as historical editions), and we're fundamentally more a collection of sources than a synthesis of them like WP. But we are certainly not a complete collection of sources, by any means (for both practical and legal reasons).
For sure, I'm not meaning to denigrate IMSLP, as it's a great project that offers access to so much material that's otherwise a pain to get to. I was just trying to make the distinction that when I want the highest-quality materials I can find for performance or study, that's not where I'll find them. But it's wonderful for quick easy access, invaluable for browsing and making finds when you're far from any university library etc.
> IMSLP accepts urtext editions over 25 years old.
Do you have a working definition of "urtext"? A lot of famous Bach and Mozart keyboard stuff was written on C clef for the right hand, but many so-called urtexts transcribe it to G. I don't understand how this can be seriously called urtext.
What counts as a purely mechanical adjustment? Can you apply any trivial and reversible operation to the notation? I guess changing the time signature to an equivalent one is acceptable. Changing all the notes to half their length? Replacing dotted notes by ligatures? Switching the key would be probably a "creative" change, but it's just as mechanical as the others. What if I move the key up a semitone but then I add a text that says to tune the instrument a semitone down? Does said text really matter, considering the historical tuning has changed by almost a whole semitone along the centuries?
I feel very uneasy changing the notation of the original, even if the music sounds the same, and naming it "urtext".
No big deal... after all, you can buy "urtext" with editor-provided fingerings from many publishers, so the word is almost meaningless at this point.
Any change that can be made without "skill and judgment" as would be involved in the creation of an original work is definitively mechanical per Canadian copyright law. Changing the clef from one to another is just like changing the font from one to another, which in Canada is considered the prototypical mechanical change.
Maybe you don't like modern clefs, but by no means are they any sort of "original" work by the standards of copyright law in any country. (Even in the small handful of countries that recognize typographical arrangements/engravings per se as copyrightable in themselves, like the UK, changing the clefs used is not considered original in any way.)
Pure transposition, by the way, is also not considered an original copyrightable creative change.
I think you have focused in on the wrong aspect entirely from the musical standpoint... the purpose of any of these editions is not to be a facsimile of some existing document (facsimiles of autograph manuscripts exist), but really just to be critical editions taking into account a number of sources and intending to establish the work as it is in a certain state (generally, an early state) according to certain editorial principles, rather than reflecting the editor's personal creative opinions on how the work should be interpreted.
As for the fingerings provided in some critical editions, these are not really relevant, because they are clearly marked (when applicable) as separate from the text itself, and they can easily be redacted (as we need to do sometimes) or ignored. By the same token, the preface or editorial footnotes in these editions are separate from the presented musical object — do you believe a preface or footnotes somehow makes the thing provided in the same pages indescribable?
Thanks for your detailed answer! I guess I'm just used to critical editions in poetry, which are supposed to be identical to a facsimile but without transparencies nor coffee stains. The critical comments and the text are separated in odd/even pages. The even pages have a lot of notes, and are sometimes longer than the actual text! They explain the history of a single comma along the several editions of the poem in question, etc. I always hoped that musical urtexts would be like that, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Fortunately, we have IMSLP where we can at least see most of the originals nowadays!
> IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions.
You picked my interest.
- what makes an "edition" ("score"?) outdated?
- can you give examples for a weird editorial decision, maybe by additionally providing an alternative good editorial version?
- what happened that something deemed correct (?) over 50 years ago is nowadays something no one agrees with?
In the last decades philological standards for reproducing the original form of a musical work taking into account historical musical traditions, composing and performance practices have become much more thorough. Editions from the 19th and early 20th century which you can find on IMSLP because they are out of copyright restrictions often don't meet these scholarly standards. They very often reflect performance practises and the style of their time. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition.
I’d add that some of the older texts are really badly laid out - often handwritten or in a strange typeface that makes them really hard to mentally parse when you‘re used to the uniformity of modern scores.
That said imslp is still a life-saver and playing music would be a lot more painful (and expensive!) without it
To give an example to further illustrate answers you've received. In the 1800s it was common to produce heavily editorialized volumes of Bach, Scarlatti and other baroque keyboard works, with tempo and dynamic indications, written-out ornamentation, phrasing and articulation marks, pedalling, and other directions that would have been a relatively alien language in the actual autograph and early editions. These were much more reflective of (romantic) performance practices of the day than of the original period. While much of it could be taken as potentially interesting suggestion about interpretation on modern instruments, it gets hopelessly muddled when the score fails to distinguish between what content is the editors' vs. the composer's, as they so often do. Something like this of Bach's C major prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1, shows basically all the different kinds of unwanted editorializing I described: https://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP05948-WTC_Mugellini_No._1-12...
A modern Urtext edition would also include detailed information about which manuscript and early edition sources it was prepared from, and any unresolved or variant readings between these sources, with performance suggestions (apart sometimes from fingerings) relegated to supplementary notes that are clearly written by the editors and not the composer.
I don't presume to know what they meant, but as an example of something I think fits the bill, I downloaded "Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home" and the lyrics are full of a certain type of phonetic transliteration from vernacular Afro-American English (as if it's a foreign language or something) the likes of which you would probably never see today (e.g. lots of "dat" and "dey" and "throw'd" and "de whole day" and so on).
It looks like Musopen, at least partially, created their sheet music archive by scraping IMSLP.
I picked a somewhat well-known (but not too well-known) composer (Wilhelm Stenhammar) and selected three works at random. In each case, Musopen's file is the same as the topmost file on IMSLP.
Far, far greater selection. Also, within a given work, there are multiple scores published at different times, so you can see the editing from multiple perspectives. For example, different fingering suggestions on piano pieces, etc.
I wondered the same, but apparently not. Excerpt from their About page[1].
> IMSLP, also known as the International Music Score Library Project or Petrucci Music Library, was started in 2006. The logo on the main page is a capital letter A. It was taken from the beginning of the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. It was published in Venice in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci, the library's namesake.
Weird licence though - it’s a rewrite of the GPL which they call “public domain”. In addition the site is more clunky and the community less welcoming. I just use IMSLP for my choral music uploads and encourage others to do the same.
I really reallyREALLY dislike that they use Google as an internal search engine. It's hideous to use and navigate since it also opens a new tab and basically prohibits you from using the site in any normal fashion if you don't like being tracked and using Google
What I'd love to do is use OCR on a bunch of these and be able to freely use the pieces by rendering them with MIDI. There are pieces I want to use in my short films or whatever, but all the recordings are copyrighted even if the music is now public-domain.
Music OCR is in general in a pretty terrible state these days (I’ve tried most of the options on the market). I’ve heard good things about soundslice[1] though, but I haven’t had the occasion to try it yet.
Hello, I lead the creation of the Soundslice music scanning tool! My biased opinion is that we get much better results than other tools, even though it's still in beta and doesn't support the full range of notations we aim to support.
We're using machine learning instead of old-school image processing techniques (which are fast but can be very brittle).
"related" - possibly Ottaviano Petrucci was some ancestor of John Petrucci though. Even he would only know if he's gotten into family history research.
The Mutopia project is dormant (per admissions and observations from contributors in the project's mailing list), and under current maintainership (or lack thereof) having contributions processed is hit-or-miss[0].
> latex versions of music
Lilypond is not based on (La)TeX, but lilypond-book, a companion utility that processes lilypond files, allows scores (or fragments) to be integrated into LaTeX, DocBook, Texinfo, and HTML documents[1].
(There is a LaTeX package for music typesetting called MusiXTeX[2], which was used by many scores of the former Werner Icking Music Archive, which merged[3] long ago into IMSLP).
I have some things you can do with it for people who are getting into it newly:
- Find sheet music for a wide variety of composers and genres, from Bach to Bartok.
- Info about composers, including biographies, bibliographies, and discographies.
- Info about musical works, including instrumentation, duration, and historical background.
- A discussion forum
They also post updates on their blogs on whats new
Also you can access it through an API as well
Ha-- he's got a single grand staff for "jazz band" and just names the instruments inline.
Judging by the historical recordings, that included an extra piano for the jazz pianist to noodle around on, which is kind of funny to see on stage. Sometimes people will throw in a banjo, too.
Also-- if you've ever had the experience of trying to remember a song and singing things in your head in the wrong order-- so did George Gershwin! You can see where he crossed out a small piano solo excerpt and then wrote it back in after a little interlude with piano and French horn. I.e., "oops, that's supposed to come later," or perhaps, "hm, this section needs to be longer, let me insert a little thingy with a drone in l.h. and French horn inner line. Yeah, that's good..."
Near the beginning he appears to have initially considered a hacky little Lisztian rising chromatic scale that alternates with a repeated octave in the bass. That apparently was supposed to lead the band playing the main theme, very soon after they already played it. He crossed out the entire thing and replaced it with an echo of the little syncopated mumble, followed by an imitation of the opening clarinet scale. Then he has a more elegant re-harmonization (changing the chords) of the main theme and a little subtle interplay between piano and jazz band. This is followed by a fairly long cadenza, and then he finally brings the jazz band back in with a full statement of the theme.
You can literally see the signs of him throwing out a simple song form with a short solo break and turning it into a more substantial through-composed form. Almost like he got stuck, went and listened to (or played) Tchaikovsky's Piano Concert No. 1, then came back and finished the piece!
Apparently, Gershwin actually improvised on top of what's written here for the debut. IIRC Marcus Roberts did the same in a live performance some years back. I'm impressed by anyone who can do that live; however, he didn't really stay in the Gershwin style for his cadenzas. Gershwin's improvisations are these idiosyncratic little polyrhythmic automatons, drawing heavily on stride style as well as popular syncopated and dance rhythms of his era. And in Rhapsody you'd have to fit that in with the classical-style arabesques. It's got to be something like musical "method acting" to be able to pull this off.
And bonus points if the improviser can throw in some subtle R&B or rap references in the improvisations. :)
Wow, 53 seconds to render a random page of that PDF in Firefox!
Chrome-- takes 10 seconds to even load the PDF reader. While it appears to have loaded most of the pages after that time, the entire window becomes laggy by about 1 second or so for any event-- scroll, page down, etc. (Didn't even dare to zoom...)
Native Gnome whatever PDF reader-- anywhere from 5 to 25 second load time for each page. (After that, that particular page responds immediately to scrolling.)
most renaissance and baroque works for plucked instruments (lutes, baroque guitars) were originally notated in tablature and such scores can certainly be found at IMSLP. If you think "guitar tabs" are a recent invention you're quite wrong.
