The ambition of this project (Open Goldberg) was a bit wider. We wanted to make:
- A software score (MuseScore) which has all of the advantages of a canonical digital document vs a picture (which is what IMSLP offers)
- A public domain recording
- A download of the unmixed stems so that people could mix their own (open source model)
- A MIDI version
All true and good points. The mailing list in question is controlled exclusively by myself and Kimiko Ishizaka and is only used to announce new projects by Kimiko.
The Open Goldberg Variations were recorded on a piano that has a self-playing function. When nearby construction interrupted the recording process with outside noise, we had the piano repeat the takes so that we would still have them, and here's a video of that happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHipuHxYfjU
Wow, that's one very nice tool. Here is my variation on that theme, output only: https://jacquesmattheij.com/midi-fied-baby-grand-piano/ The input side is 'work in progress'. Not quite a Bosendorfer, but then again that would be totally wasted on me anyway.
Do you allow those midi files to be downloaded as well? That would be a priceless resource.
I have the .boe files somewhere. They're a proprietary version of MIDI that Boesendorfer developed. If you want them, I can find them and send them. robert@opengoldbergvariations.org
Stephen Malinowski's videos of Kimiko Ishizaka's Art of the Fugue recording are breathtaking. He understands the structure of the music much the same way that Kimiko does, and it reflects in how he delineates the voices and the themes. He also gave a spectacular treatment to her completion of the unfinished final fugue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIrNDWqANCs
Yes, this is what keeps blowing me away. There are ever more pieces to be discovered and listened to and he had to make all that stuff, write it down, be a dad to a whole bunch of children, spend time 'fundraising' and playing nice with royalty and clergy for access to instruments and at the end of all that he did it without any kind of digital assistance.
Oh, and he died at 65, old for the time he lived in but still, that's pretty young by today's standards for a life full of accomplishment.
Hi! I produced this recording and project, and it's so nice to see it on the front page of Hacker News this morning.
Let's talk about Kimiko Ishizaka, the pianist. She always insists on standing in the background, letting her projects be about Bach, and public domain, while she quietly delivers the most stunning performances of these works that one can imagine.
Kimiko is German-Japanese. She grew up performing in a trio with her brothers who are also both notable classical musicians in Germany. In addition to the Goldberg Variations, she has recorded the Well-Tempered Clavier I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPHIZw7HZq4), and The Art of the Fugue (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIrNDWqANCs) and released them into the public domain as well.
Then, in 2019, she did something completely new and released an album of her own, jazz-inspired compositions for solo piano called New Me! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph35hLwcckY&list=PLeWVBqJrTS...). She continues studying Jazz and is composing a cycle of songs (pop-jazz), and a series of ragtime pieces for piano.
Kimiko is very athletic, and has placed in the top-3 at the German nationals in both powelifting and olympic weightlifting. She has a room in her house which functions both as a piano practice room, and a gym. It is painted pink and decorated with Hello Kitty, because, well, she's a half-Japanese girl who loves Hello Kitty =)
Thank you for this project and for putting the spotlight on this pianist. I listened to 'the new me' and it is very interesting how she did that and yet somehow there is a bit of Bach shining through here and there.
Yes. Her life story is really heartbreaking, wanting to become a classical pianist but being told that being black and playing classical music at the same time just wouldn't do. I'm of two minds on this - as I've written before on HN -, sad as it is that she did not follow her chosen path in the end it gave us her own material which to me is just as dear of not dearer. My all time favorite song is 'wild is the wind'.
Indeed! Especially in Blues Variations, which is - like the Golderg Variations - a theme-and-variation form. But like the WTC and AoF, it ends in a 4 voice fugue. All on a blues theme =)
Amazing music. Been listening to it on repeat for a while now... After you posted the link I went and googled her, found her own compositions and I absolutely love them.
If you have time: please research Friedrich Gulda and if Kimiko isn't aware of him yet please introduce her to his music, he went through a similar path, originally classically trained eventually went for his own style. Here is a sample:
Thank you for this project, and thank you for sharing more about Kimiko. Congrats to her for her new baby, and for her astonishing achievements. I will always support anything that brings Bach to more people.
Can you talk about the production process for this project? What hardware and software was used for the recording (and mixing?) and the rendering of the video?
First, the score was made with MuseScore. Then it was prepared as an iPad App by the MuseScore team who custom made the synchronization between the score and the music. I then recorded the iPad app as a video using the "Reflector" program for Mac OS X. The iPad app doesn't exist anymore because it was not compatible with new versions of IOS.
It's a complicated problem. In classical music, ContentID has a hard time differentiating between various recordings of say the Goldberg Variations. People were getting dozens of ContentID matches from Glenn Gould, Andras Schiff, and so forth, and each time they'd dispute the claim, the next one would come with a different recording. Nobody was doing anything nefarious, but you couldn't get any peace. Soe we (Kimiko and myself) decided to put her music into ContentID ourselves. Now it mostly identifies correctly as Kimiko's recordings, and people can ask us (robert@opengoldbergvariaitons.org) to de-monetize any video where the ads bother them. Some people don't mind, and as a result, Kimiko gets a small amount of revenue for her work as well.
OpenScore, a new initiative by the popular open source music notation software vendor MuseScore, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create machine readable editions of iconic classical works in the public domain. Kickstarter backers will be able to influence which pieces get transcribed first. They have partnered with IMSLP, the largest repository of public domain musical scans, with the intention of creating a sustainable and scalable workflow for creating a semantically complete music notation library. These scores have many advantages over the PDF scans that are currently available. They support machine playback, so a viewer can actually hear the music; they are convertible into other meaningful music formats, such as MIDI, MusicXML, and Braille notation (for blind musicians); they can be edited, arranged, corrected, and improved. The project takes inspiration from text and image based projects such as Wikipedia, and will utilize Creative Commons licensing. MuseScore has previously been involved with public domain music projects such as the Open Goldberg Variations.
So... that's what we did!