I have never been so sad to see a website die and end up as a holding page as when I made one of my almost daily trips to the International Music Score Library Project to find that the founder has had to close it due to a cease-and-desist letter from Universal Edition.
For people like me who spend a lot of their lives researching music, particularly that of the nineteenth century, IMSLP was the most amazing resource. It was wiki-based, with dedicated contributors who scanned entire public domain orchestral scores lovingly and altruistically. It was the Project Gutenberg of the music world, and in the short time that it was going, I learnt enormous amounts from it because it gave me access to orchestral scores that I just wanted a quick glance at, but would not be able to afford to get, either in terms of time or money. A few years ago, I despaired of ever finding Tchaikovsky’s piano duets of the 50 Russian folksongs, because the only edition in print was just a selection IMSLP was just the kind of place where some good soul would have scanned them and uploaded them, and the world would be a better place for it.
To be fair to Universal Edition, they weren’t asking for the whole site to be taken down. There was some thin ice being skated on where composers were out of copyright in Canada, but not elsewhere. But once the legal challenge has been made, not just against the founder but the contributors too, you can understand why an individual wouldn’t want to take the risk of being sued and bring his colleagues down with him. it’s tragic that a site that was primarily of benefit to researchers, students and music lovers should be cut off in its prime, and I’m feeling the loss already – one of the greatest resources for music research on the internet has just disappeared overnight, and its a sad day not just for music, but for the internet, too. This is what it was made for, but this disappears and spam, porn and Texas hold’em remains. What a shame UE couldn’t have found a way to support and work with IMSLP instead.
