IMSLP Forums

There are a lot of symphonic full scores on IMSLP, but a shortage of individual parts. I realize that parts take up a lot of time and space, but for those of us who want to play the music, they are much more useful.

Anyway, if you have the parts to those symphonies, maybe scanning them in might be possible?

There are a few sets of parts here at IMSLP. Those for Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 are fairly good, though a librarian for a major orchestra I know who has downloaded them and compared them with the Kirkor ed. of the full score (posted on the same IMSLP page) tells me that whichever division of Muzgiz engraved the parts obviously did not refer to the Muzgiz score issued a few years before! These parts were evidently re-engraved from a set of the old Gutheil parts.

There is a CD series called "The Orhestral Musician's CD Library" which consists of scans of public domain orchestra parts. Apparently, the volumes are all classified by instrument so that the Oboe CD's contain Oboe parts for all manner of PD orchestra works. As with CD Sheet Music, the logo is protected by trademark law, but the scanned music itself if free.

One possible way to get parts is from a good midi file: just open it in finale (i think sibelius also works) and it will give you a pretty good score of the music, it may need dynamics/articulations added, but that's not too hard and most other things are fine. Then all you need to do is extract the parts. The only problems are that i don't know the copyright status of midi files, you may need permission from whoever originally sequenced it, and that there's no guarantee of quality or acuracy, so it would really need checking against a real score.

I've never played any music i've got like this, but the scores look good on the screen.

I'm afraid it's not that easy. Midi files opened in Sibelius or Finale are usually a complete mess that demand a lot of cleaning. Apart from copying all articulations and directions, you also need to assign notes to different voices, retype most tuplets, correct enharmonic spelling of accidentals etc. It's also not enough to just extract the parts. Even if the score looks ok, the parts usually have lots of overlapping objects as the spacings and staff size isn't the same as in the full score. The page layout also needs to be carefully considered to allow comfortable page turns. Furthermore, you would probably have to proofread every single note as the creator of the MIDI-file could very easily have made some mistakes. Parts are needed only for performance and therefore cannot allow any mistakes. All in all the amount of work for a full symphony is enormous and I would suggest you'd rather find a set of already edited parts and scan them.

Oh, and by the way, superb site you've got here! Just found it today and I'm extremely excited about what I've seen so far! I always hoped someone would start a project like this. I'll have a look through my shelves to see if there's anything there I could contribute with.

Yeah, using a midi file won't get the part all the way there but it might save some time. I think it would be best to have a real scanned part however.

If anyone out there has access to public domain parts I'm sure there would be people here more than willing to help scan them (myself included). Are there any libraries out there that let people check out sets of parts?

I own one of the orchestra musician library cd's. The images are 300 dpi which is good enough. Every image has the logo on it so that would take some work. Also how would one determine the publisher of the part?

In any case I also agree that parts would be a wonderful addition.

Oh, forgot the cue notes. This is actually the most time consuming part of the work and it also requires quite a bit of knowledge about orchestras and orchestral mentality. I have to agree with horndude that scanned parts are the best.

However, seeing there still is lots of chamber works without parts, shouldn't these have higher priority? I guess it's a lot more common that people looking for scores on the internet want to perform a Beethoven string quartet than Mahler's 8th. Parts for chamber music shouldn't be that hard to find either.

I have access to my school's orchestra library and could scan some parts if there are specific requests. The Rachmaninoff parts I scanned I think were pretty rare, so I thought it might be nice to include them.

Yeah, using a midi file won't get the part all the way there but it might save some time.

I don't believe they are quicker, the amount of proof reading you have to do makes it about the same amount of work as re-typesetting it. and (IMO) re-typesetting it is more fun (because you tend to learn more).

Orchestral parts would be hard to come by as you'd need access in some manner to an orchestra library as this type of material is not kept by "normal" lending libraries. And creating parts from MIDI files is absolutely ridiculous to me, an orchestral musician, and I would never resort to this, even as a last-ditch effort. Importing a MIDI into your notation program of choice looses almost all vital details and leaves only raw notes. You're better off bribing your local orchestra librarian for parts in the instance you can't buy the part from Kalmus (many parts can be bought separately from them).

I have access to my school's orchestra library and could scan some parts if there are specific requests.

It's your time, but it would be nice to get the parts to some of the basics here at some point (i.e. Orchestral works of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, ... ok I ask too much).

I don't believe they are quicker, the amount of proof reading you have to do makes it about the same amount of work as re-typesetting it. and (IMO) re-typesetting it is more fun (because you tend to learn more).

True enough.

Witold wrote: However, seeing there still is lots of chamber works without parts, shouldn't these have higher priority? I guess it's a lot more common that people looking for scores on the internet want to perform a Beethoven string quartet than Mahler's 8th. Parts for chamber music shouldn't be that hard to find either.

I've actually done this with my Pierne Trio upload - Score + Vln and VC parts. I think whenever possible I will be doing this, since it makes the score useful for performance rather than simply for study.

If I have time, I'd like to create parts for rare old orchestral scores at some point - many of these old symphonic scores it is very difficult to get parts for performance.

Cheers,

-G

Time to ressurect this thread...

The Danish Royal Library has just posted a whole pile of symphonies in individual parts from one of their collections ca.1765.

Names like Abel, Wagenseil, Galuppi, Stamitz, Sammartini, Pergolesi, King Friedrich II, Gossec, and a lot of others I am not familiar with.

Here is the link:

http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/samling/ma/digmu ... index.html

One of my past complaints about IMSLP has been the lack of orchestral parts. To bring back a suggestion Carolus mentioned earlier, the Orchestra Musician's CD-ROM Library seems like it could be a great thing for IMSLP, though I don't know if IMSLP would be very good for it.

The collection for each instrument consists of 8-10 volumes, with about 50-60 pieces per volume. I think they are all orchestral parts, and the parts are all public domain in the US. (There is one volume per CD that contains all US-only material, which is only sold to US customers). Each volume costs $20, which comes to about $200 per instrument, or about $2600 for the entire collection. I'd be willing to buy a decent amount of the violin collection to contribute, but I don't have a lot of funds.

I don't know how much extra hassle it would be to upload these. They say they use "Adobe Acrobat Technology," which I assume means the files are pdfs. My guess is that we would need to remove logos.

Actually, I just looked at SheetMusicPlus.com, and it turns out they're having a sale, and the volumes are only $16 each. I think I'll probably go ahead and order some of the violin ones. Anyone else?

ras1 wrote:Actually, I just looked at SheetMusicPlus.com, and it turns out they're having a sale, and the volumes are only $16 each. I think I'll probably go ahead and order some of the violin ones. Anyone else?

Well if you know where to look, one can easily find most if not all the SheetMusicPlus CDs for DL. From what I can tell, one only needs to remove the SMP logos and it'd be legit.


-Lala-

Hmm... this is from the site.

Important: This product is licensed for one computer. By opening any of the files on this CD-ROM, you agree to the terms of the license. Click on the bookmark to the left to view the complete license. While the works on this CD-ROM are in the Public Domain, the PDF files are copyrighted and may be printed by the licensee for his/her personal use, but not otherwise copied or reproduced.

Keeping in mind the only thing they print is the logo, can they do this? Or is there a way to get around it?

Aside from that, not to condone breaking the law, but if a file shows up on IMSLP that is actually one of their files with the logo removed, how would they know?