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In 2006 a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, Edward W. Guo, began scanning musical scores using the software MediaWiki.  The project, imslp.org, now has over 150,000 scores of 48,000 works of 7,000 composers.  Although the scores are supposedly in the public domain or by contemporary composers who want to share their music, there have been copyright problems.  Currently the site operates in Canada where copyright is less stringent.  Mr. Guo also formed a company, Project Petrucci, to remove himself from personal liability.  In addition to information and dates of different scores, some pieces now include recordings with a link to Amazon for purchase.  Although music publishers are concerned for their future, the Music Score Library Project is an amazing resource.  Searching for the flute part of Dvorak’s 7th Symphony or the score of Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” was completed in less than ten minutes including the downloads and printing.  A professional string quartet that tours in the US now uses downloads on laptops from the site instead of sheet music.  For librarians and musicians,  this site provides information instantly that ten years ago would have been unavailable in the majority of libraries in the world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 10:14 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.