IMSLP

[elsie07]

IMSLP no longer exists!

https://imslp.org/

Too bad to lose such an amazing resource......

[pianistimo]

agreed!  public domain no longer means anything.  these people should get it right back at them for saying one thing and doing another.  to kill something helpful  - and allow trash on other sites.  this is actually just another freedom smushed. 

[jakev2.0]

Shame.

A great site, and great resource that will be sorely missed.

Stupid shame too, especially considering most of the scores were in the public domain.

[invictious]

Oh no...that's where i got most of the orchestral scores...


Man...

[pianogeek_cz]

Ack!
That hurts!

[counterpoint]

We now see, that the "copyright" laws are not used to protect the copyrights (which would be a good thing) but to fight a war against all non-commercial music idealists. And that's really scandalous.

Not a good PR action of UE.

[thalbergmad]

agreed!  public domain no longer means anything.  these people should get it right back at them for saying one thing and doing another.  to kill something helpful  - and allow trash on other sites.  this is actually just another freedom smushed. 

The place was not properly policed and was littered with copyrighted scores, although i accept that in the main it was not.

It still amazes me that places like gamingforce, that has allowed the postings of 1000's of copyrighted scores and recordings has still survived. Eventually, the site was going to grow into something huge and i guess music publishers just don't like people giving things away.

I wish the copyright police would attack the ever growing bunch of tossers selling scans on e bay.

Thal

[ronde_des_sylphes]

It still amazes me that places like gamingforce, that has allowed the postings of 1000's of copyrighted scores and recordings has still survived.

..

I wish the copyright police would attack the ever growing bunch of tossers selling scans on e bay.

Yes, the survival of Gamingforce amazes me also. I cannot understand the position taken by large companies. There is copyright abuse on a massive level on youtube, for example, but it is very rare for anything to happen.

IMSLP was an enormously useful resource, and had the side benefit of hurting people selling scans which they have purloined from others. I'm willing to bet that Universal paid out more in lawyers' fees than they were losing in copyright infringement..

[richard black]

That's a shame, and the letter currently residing on the IMSLP front page is well worth a read, but I do think 'Feldmahler' probably erred in trying to include so many composers that are unquestionably in copyright in quite a lot of the world. A very interesting and worthwhile site could still be made by including music published before 1907, by composers all of whom died before 1937, and would be completely legal everywhere with no room for argument by publishers' lawyers.

I use Everynote quite a lot: yes, one has to pay, but to my mind (thinking as a self-employed person for whom time is money) a couple of bucks for a score is money well spent when it saves me a few minutes' searching in a library (never mind the 20 mins journey each way to and from the library, and obviously I'm already one of the lucky ones in being that close to one of the world's most useful public music libraries). Everynote has some stuff that is most certainly in copyright in some countries. I wonder how many lawyers' letters they end up shrugging off?

[invictious]

So..anyone know any good resources for getting full scores?
I was intending to get:

Brahms - Symphony No.1 Mov. I
Dvorak - Symphony no.9 Mov. III and IV
Dvorak - Slavonic Dance No.1 in C Major
Dvorak - Slavonic Dance no.8 in G minor
Glinka - Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite (listened to this recently, fell in love with it)
Rossini - Barber of Seville overture
Rach - Concerto no.2


and some others which I won't bother to mention.

[retrouvailles]

Gamingforce is the answer to the fall of IMSLP.

[invictious]

Someone want to carry on the legacy? but having their servers based in Russia?

Actually..Russia is slowly introducing copyright laws..so in a few years, it will all be gone!

Obviously, you can base your server in Africa or something, but there are obvious practicality problems

so, GAMINGFORCE, you are my new favorite!

[pianistimo]

indiana university has a lot of scores.  the thing is - this is all going commercial on the internet and once they find where more free scores (non-commercial) are - they'll ax them, too.  that's my fear.  this is internet policing gone extreme.  you can't use them in non-commercial ways anymore (ie music after 1907 or whatever in whatever country) and so you're expected only to play older music?  what about pianists that want to play something and have to wait three weeks to get it in the mail.  why not practice temporarily with the best score you can find.  i guess that's illegal.  why are so many other much worse things NOT illegal.  the system is very money oriented. 

even gutenberg (free books) doesn't have fux's gradus ad parnassum anymore!  i knew when i saw it that i should print it out.  HOW MANY YEARS HAS THAT BEEN OUT OF PRINT.  and yet, who knows how many publishers are still attempting to make money on it.  good grief!  give it a break.  have a heart for many younger college students, too, who could benefit but don't want to buy the book.

the system is all about making money.

[thalbergmad]

the system is all about making money.

Well, you could strike me down with a feather.

Thal

[richard black]

Actually, the letter from UE is not unreasonable (it's on the IMSLP site, there's a link to it in the other thread on this subject on this forum, in 'Anything but Piano'). The owner took the whole site down, as I understand it, because there simply wasn't time to comply in detail with the UE request. The mention by the UE solicitors of some composers who are in principle out of copyright (Mahler and Janacek, for instance) brings up the subject of copyright in editions as opposed to pieces. You could legitimately post the original score of, say, Mahler's 1st symphony with no qualms at all, but the new edition of his 'Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen' which I bought recently is in copyright because it includes new editorial material. Janacek's operas are in copyright because the libretto is copyright, though J's instrumental pieces are out (the ones published in his lifetime, anyway). All of which is clearly going to make it a non-trivial job to weed out copyright stuff.

I don't see why people get so upset at the idea of copyright. Farmers grow cabbages in unfenced fields round the area I come from, but that doesn't mean you can legitimately go and help yourself to a cabbage, however much you like them. It cost the farmer time and money to plant and tend them, and it cost the music publishers time and money to typeset, print, promote, stock and supply music scores. Of course they want to make some money at it, they've got bills to pay at home and shareholders to consider, but if they were just money-grubbers they would have become stock market traders, wouldn't they?

[thalbergmad]

Farmers grow cabbages in unfenced fields round the area I come from, but that doesn't mean you can legitimately go and help yourself to a cabbage, however much you like them. It cost the farmer time and money to plant and tend them, and it cost the music publishers time and money to typeset, print, promote, stock and supply music scores.

Interesting, but music publishers are also taking a cabbage that someone else grew, adding a couple of leaves and selling it again as their own.

Thal

[rallestar]

In the end, these publishers are a result of the system growing naturally into it's most efficient shape. Composers needed publishers to get their works promoted and published, and publishers would do a good job in making great editions of these works.

I remind everyone that without music publishers, much less time would be paid to making good, lasting scores, critically reviewed and well-researched editions and the prices are generally reasonable.

Those who say that "no-one should claim Beethovens/Liszts/Any composers art" would in his own dreamworld have to visit Vienna to do their own manual copying of the autographs. Publishers aren't out there to harm people. They're simply offering a service, and one I value very much.

[richard black]

What Rallestar said - hear hear!

[Nightscape]

I value music publishers for the great editions of composers' music that they sell.  If I was looking for a great, authoritative urtex edition of a piece of music, I wouldn't look on IMSLP because that isn't what IMSLP was designed for.

The goal of IMSLP was to bring any piece of music in the public domain to anyone anywhere - imagine you lived somewhere where it would be difficult, perhaps taking weeks or months to obtain the score to a Schumann symphony or something - you could just log onto IMSLP and a perfectly legal, public domain score would be available to you instantaneously - not a great urtex edition, but enough to give you a great idea of the music.

Music publishers are businessmen - they may hire musicians to do editing and the like, but a corporation is still a corporation and money always comes first.  Because money is the blood of a corporation - without it it would die.  What Universal Edition did they did out of greed and paranoia.  I don't believe for a second that IMSLP promoted or even allowed any sort of copyright infringement - any illegal score would either not be allowed on the site or would be deleted within hours.  It's all about competition - and IMSLP was competition for Universal Edition, and they moved in and killed the competition - they aren't stupid and I'm quite sure their lawyers did enough research on the site owner to know he was just a college student who had no money to spend on legal fees and the like.

I'm just glad it was Universal Edition and not a publishing company that I really like.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Interesting, but music publishers are also taking a cabbage that someone else grew, adding a couple of leaves and selling it again as their own.

Thal

Indeed.

I often wonder what would happen if someone scanned X's edition of (insert piece that is still going to be in copyright), digitally manipulated it, reformatted it so that the pages didn't end on the same bars, etc, made a few small editorial changes,and then presented it as their own "copyright edition".

[richard black]

OK, I'll bore you all with one more defence of the copyright principle as it applies here. Publishers are in the business of long-term planning, and arguably none more so than music publishers. Books published today can be enormously successful tomorrow, quite literally (Harry Potter, anyone?), but music scores do very often take years, many years, to fly (shuffle) off the shelves due to the much slower public uptake of new music. Even composers who were a success in their own lifetime were often an even bigger one afterwards (R. Strauss, for instance: Salome and Elektra took decades to get into the core repertoire) and many who came to be regarded as great had little success in their lifetime - look at Mahler, a stape of every concert season since the 1970s but a relative rarity before that. With the 70-year copyright rule, publishers are looking to pay for their experimental sign-ups today with the profits from the previous generations' compositions. If Universal is to get on with printing and promoting their latest young composers (they've got some new Wunderkind, I've forgotten his name already, born in 1978, on their home page right now) they really do need the proceeds from Strauss and Janacek - and bear in mind also that some of those proceeds are presumably also going to the Strauss and Janacek (or probably Max Brod in the latter case) estates.

All right, composers could put all their music on their own web site and cut out the middleman, and we'd have to download it (probably in very poor-quality typesetting), print it out, bind it.... and how would we find out about it in the first place? There's no question but that the Internet will play a part in all this, but it won't necessarily be for the better in all ways.

Where downloadable scores really come in is in the case of music that's long out of print. Even when the music is technically in copyright one could make a case for this being hardly a crime against humanity: some publishers do a decent enough 'print on demand' service for out-of-print stuff, but where they don't, or they've simply lost the originals or charge a completely extortionate price (I've been charged £1 a page for what was, when it arrived, a pretty shoddy photocopy, by one firm), a bit of up/downloading is easy enough to justify. But that's a major step away from distributing stuff that available in bricks-and-mortar shops, online retailers or even in legally downloadable form from the publisher's site.

Of course we all want everything to cost less than it does, but it makes no more sense to vilify publishers than it does shopkeepers, road-menders, accountants or anyone else who provides a living and charges a fee/wage for doing it.

[thalbergmad]

Indeed.

I often wonder what would happen if someone scanned X's edition of (insert piece that is still going to be in copyright), digitally manipulated it, reformatted it so that the pages didn't end on the same bars, etc, made a few small editorial changes,and then presented it as their own "copyright edition".

Reminds me a little of a bunch of tossers that used to sell Thalberg scores.

They would get a bad photocopy, wrap it in a crappy yellow cover, insert a couple of staples and then try to sell of for £30.

The Mombeeks of this world must be celebrating at the moment.

Thal

[richard black]

Reminds me a little of a bunch of tossers that used to sell Thalberg scores.

They would get a bad photocopy, wrap it in a crappy yellow cover, insert a couple of staples and then try to sell of for £30.

I remember them. That _was_ taking the p***, good and proper.

[thalbergmad]

Of course we all want everything to cost less than it does, but it makes no more sense to vilify publishers than it does shopkeepers, road-menders, accountants or anyone else who provides a living and charges a fee/wage for doing it.

Very good points Sir, but i have yet to hear of an accountant who is still charging for a 1940 set of accounts.

Thal

[arensky]

I am missing IMSLP and hope it comes back. I tried to find works of Manuel Ponce from the publishers but to no avail. IMSLP provided them.

UE has entered this discussion on the IMSLP forum, very interesting.

https://imslpforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=664

[dnephi]

Salome never really hit the spot for me...

[soliloquy]

Reading that letter was rough.  It almost felt like a suicide letter from a good friend

[chopininov]

I died a little inside 

[retrouvailles]

Gamingforce will make you forget about IMSLP if you go to it.

[chopininov]

Exactly where in Gamingforce? Because every time I go there, I never see anything about music. Where should I look?

[retrouvailles]

The concert hall forum.

[invictious]

I think there IS a chance that it might come back! Two months, but MAN! COME ON IMSLP, FIGHT FOR IT!

[amelialw]

how about this website https://www.piano.ru/library-e.html

[retrouvailles]

That website is pretty good, but its still not IMSLP or gamingforce. Their self-made editions sometimes aren't that great either.

[chopininov]

There's also this website: https://vkgfx.com/scores/
It doesn't have everything, but it does have complete Chopin library, and a lot of Liszt. It also has some Alkan, Ligeti, Volodos, and even Cziffra.

[spaciiey]

The Sheet Music Archive ( https://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/ ) I have found fairly useful... although it has only got classical music, it still has copious amounts of stuff. You are only meant to download two things per day, you can get around it by disabling cookies for the website.

to do that in firefox, just go tools - options - privacy - exceptions, and you can do it from there.

[quasimodo]

how about this website https://www.piano.ru/library-e.html

It's closed too...

[vuvais]

Shame.

A great site, and great resource that will be sorely missed.

Stupid shame too, especially considering most of the scores were in the public domain.

You've got to be joking! Its actually down? Can't they get back the site or something?
Well...goodbye IMSLP

[point of grace]

grrrrrrrr
do you think it will be re.opened?

i hope soooo!!!

[thierry13]

It's closed too...

No piano.ru is not closed at all ... and yes IMSLP will reopen, it's only a matter of time.

[point of grace]

No piano.ru is not closed at all ... and yes IMSLP will reopen, it's only a matter of time.

oh, thanx God