Music Is Free! (When It's Five Hundred Years Old!)

Hallelujah.

The re-opening of the Internet Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) isn't just important for my own selfish needs, but it's a necessary (if a small or limited audience) victory in the intellectual property struggles which I generally leave to my betters. (Or, specifically, one better in particular.) I'm not going to hash out the basis of the position on IP and copyright as filtered through my worldview, but briefly: the IMSLP was shut down under threat of lawsuit from certain (primarily European, if I recall) music publishers because some users had uploaded works which were still under copyright. Here I'm going to take a moment and say: Bad Users! Very Bad! What you were doing legally amounted to encouraging theft, doing so in a public place, and most importantly to me, wound up Ruining It For Everyone Else. The purpose of the IMSLP is to archive editions of music which are no longer under copyright.

Essentially, nobody owns the rights to publish editions of, say, Haydn's string quartets, which means that everyone is free to do so (and many publishers do offer such editions). If the IMSLP were scanning the Dover editions and presenting them as copyright free, that would be Wrong; what the IMSLP is about is putting up old editions which are themselves no longer in copyright. The open letter linked above heartily defends this position, just after a few paragraphs on how the IMSLP and publishers can work together to mutual benefit: "However, permit me to make one point clear here in no uncertain terms. IMSLP will continue to oppose organizations who attempt to limit and restrict the already much-shrunken public domain." The only people who benefit from keeping ostensibly public domain works like those of Bach or Haydn or Schumann or (I presume) Wagner out of the hands of the public unless forced to pay for them are the publishers offering their own editions. (Again, the ostensible purpose of the threatened suits which forced the site's closure regarded works which were under copyright, but I'm fairly certain that from the publishing industry's standpoint [or its most conservative standpoint] this is the greater concern.)

The ancillary point to the reopening of the IMSLP and the letter's invitation to music publishers to consider new models for distributing and promoting their products is that the current system for publishing the works of contemporary composers is broken. If I were interested, as I was some months ago, in perusing a score by a young and acclaimed composer like, say, Thomas Ades, some research would indicate that he has a deal as a house composer for the publisher Faber Music. Here are a listing of his scores which are for sale (many more are only available for rental), and please note that prices are in Pounds sterling, currently worth just less than $2. The cheapest non-libretto work here, is the Arcadiana string quartet, which would cost something like $20 before shipping and taxes. I know that Ades and his publishers would like to derive some income from the sale of his scores, but I bought pretty much the complete string quartets of Haydn online for about $80 total. And Haydn wrote a LOT of quartets. The score to arguably his most famous instrumental piece, the symphonic work Asyla, would be more like $60. Is it any wonder, then, that I could only find one score of his at my local library, or that I couldn't find (with, granted, a very brief search) any of his scores available on Amazon? This isn't a system that works very well insofar as serving the needs of a small but interested public is concerned, and the health of the score-publishing industry as well as notated music in general is dependent on, and should be solicitous of, said small but interested public.