Some of us who have or have had piano (or any other classical instrument) lessons will remember the days when our teacher (usually old and bad-breathed), used to scrounge around in an old wooden drawer for a particular manuscript or piece of classical music. When they eventually found the piece they were (or weren’t) looking for, they opened it up, allowed dust to permeate out, and proceeded to the photocopy machine (that’s if you were lucky). The shnoop teachers made us pay extra for the photocopies, while the smart ones made us do our own (well not so smart if we lost the manuscript along the way). The manuscripts were often larger than A4, yellowed through decades of use, dog-eared, and thick with relentless scribbling for previous pupils. The photocopies invariably came out with parts of the staves missing on the left or right, illegible notes, and old-fashioned cursive scrawled over the legible parts. The more modern teachers made us go to the music shop and buy what is essentially royalty free music (photocopying is illegal you know!) at expensive prices (the extra charge is often justified on the basis that Mozart actually meant a D-sharp and all the previous edition editors were idiots in misreading it as a C-sharp). Well I’m glad to say that those days are over.

The search-engine hounds in us have over the years managed to find free scannings of classical music. However, it is often difficult to get the pieces we want, and to get there we have to trawl through Smilie adverts and obnoxious pop-ups. The other day, looking for a particular piece online, I came across PianoStreet.com. Piano Street is an online classical music library with a great and growing selection of fully licensed classical manuscripts, all available on PDF for the excellent price of $3.00 a month. All the pieces are easily searchable using a number of filters, and are categorized according to the skill level of the piece. Recordings and original composer transcripts are also available for many of the pieces. The service is only available for piano at the moment, but will no doubt expand to other instruments in time. Only those who have gone through the process described above will appreciate how effectively this service streamlines the finding, storing, and copying of classical sheet music. You simply print or save the manuscript, and it comes out perfectly set on the page, with none of the trappings of those drawer-and-time infested archives of your teacher. Classical music teachers are obviously the perfect customers for the service, because it saves considerable time and cost (let alone shelf-space) in finding the music for the student (and it’s legal). The only problem is that music teachers tend not to be the most technologically clued-up people (especially the nonagenarians amongst them). Hopefully youngsters will use that as an opportunity to earn money (or get lesson discounts) off their teachers by providing the service for them.

posted by rowanp at 5:27 pm & filed under web, technology, music |