robertDouglass

lobbyists!

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

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

So... that's what we did!

Great recording!

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.

There's an article on the recording process here: https://opengoldbergvariations.org/news/recording-the-goldbe...

Anne-Marie Sylvestre used Pyramix as her DAW. I don't know more than that, though.

Brad Mehldau is Kimiko's absolute favorite jazz pianist. His mastery of harmony and his impeccable piano technique really speaks to her.

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.

We love Gulda!

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

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 =)

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

The scope of his creation is just unfathomable. The utter profundity of his pieces, followed by the sheer proliferation.

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 =)

The most amazing thing of all just happened to Kimiko, however. She gave birth to a beautiful son (https://twitter.com/KimikoIshizaka/status/127507285375949619...), just 5 days ago.

Live in 40 minutes: https://youtu.be/H1WNHVXJiUg

Glad to hear this!

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.

about defining infrastructure and application code side by side.

Thanks - me too! So far Kimiko's supporters have gotten the job done, a fact for which she is eternally grateful.

Chopin loved Pleyels so much he even took one on vacation with him to the island of Majorca. There, he composed the 24 Préludes which Kimiko Ishizaka will record (with 4K video), and release to the Creative Commons.

I've been following the development and growing maturity of MuseScore for years. This is a big milestone. In the past years, we've seen a weakening and decline of the leading proprietary programs in this space, with Finale (http://www.sibeliusblog.com/news/layoffs-and-reorganization-...) and Sibelius (http://www.sibeliusblog.com/people/avids-michael-ost-speaks-...) suffering from lack of investment, reorganisation, and a growing aversion to vendor lock-in (http://blog.adamspiers.org/2013/02/25/music-industry-learns-...). In that context, it's a huge win for libre software to have MuseScore running strong, with the best release ever, and other recent milestones like the completion of the Open Well-Tempered Clavier project.

I uploaded a photo of the microphone setup: https://www.flickr.com/photos/robertdouglass/16880463591/

All the noises captured were the noises Kimiko made while creating the work.

Kimiko's mailing list: http://eepurl.com/-9uzf

It's a Bandcamp limitation. I put the license file in the download to clarify that it's CC0.

Yeah, that's a Bandcamp thing. The Licence file in the download clarifies that it's CC0.

Indeed. One of the things that Kimiko is looking forward to is the pedal. Chopin is extremely precise with his pedal marks, to the point where many performers overlook them almost altogether because they're so demandingly prescriptive. Kimiko, the purist that she is, wants to perform Chopin's pedalling as close to exactly like he wanted it as possible, and is looking forward to hearing what it sounds like on the Pleyel piano, in the hope that it will explain some of the difficult to understand aspects of his pedalling markings.

Great insight, and very true. This edition is opinionated. The editor, Olivier Miquel, had some very clear "design goals" in mind. Not like "rewrite Bach", or anything like that, but he wanted it to be "playable" to people who may otherwise find the notation quirks of Bach off-putting. Some people will take issue with these decisions, but it's like you said - there is no one true WTC.

That's wonderful! It's not the QWERTY, but the C-C#-D-D# keyboard.

Here's a bit about Bach's influence http://www.musicanthology.org/bach-and-handel-their-influenc...

My opinion - this recording is better.

IMSLP is great, and these new releases will be hosted there too. In fact, you can find the 2012 Open Goldberg Variations (similar to this project) on IMSLP.

What IMSLP doesn't have a lot of is new, studio recordings, with the highest standard of playing and recording engineering. That's what the Open Well-Tempered Clavier provides!