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I just ordered Spiegel im Spiegel for organ.. $17.95 plus shipping. for one piece! I am pretty frugal.. this is killing me.

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/Spiegel-Im-Spiegel/19759676

here it is written for cello and piano.. you'd think I could figure this out, but the notes are too far apart for me too test on the piano.. they certainly are slow enough. I find all of Arvo Part's music absolutely gorgeous... perhaps a bit new agey, but hay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Saxe2WllAuk

still don't know how to embed.

Automatically/preferably: Copy the youtube link and press the little screen-symbol in the line above your text window. Then paste the address in dialogue.
Manually: Put the youtube link between a and a then it looks like this:

thank you very much!

or just this.

You've really been here since 2003 and never clicked that once?

Also, as for music, I generally don't by recordings or scores. IMSLP has most of course and for the newer ones that IMSLP doesn't have, I downloaded these folders, they're just sheet music arranged by letter. So like you download "Classical Sheet music composers A" and it then you have sheet music for every composer whose last name starts with that letter. From Adams to Albeniz to Alkan and so on, with a bunch of much more obscure names I will never hear of. Most of everything I could want is in these.

The usual rule is - living composer and in copyright, expensive; dead composer and out of copyright, cheap.

Arvo Part is indeed wonderful, but here's another technical challennge - how to get the umlaut on the a in Part ?

Go to the wikipedia article about him and copy-paste the name. Or set your keyboard to estonian.

It's actually quite strange why all keyboards can't just have ä's, ö's, å's, ü's, ß's and other letters that are frequently used in widely spoken languages like German (I had to a German wikipedia article to find the ß).

Strauss bekomes Strauß, Part bekomes Pärt, Schoenberg bekomes Schönberg and Dvorak bekomes Dvořák.

It's easier just to throw in an "e".

Agreed

On a Mac, you hit option-u then type the letter that gets the umlaut => Pärt

(I only know this because my name is Noël)

It's even easier than that. If you have Windows, just go to the character map and copy and paste the desired letter with its diacritical mark from that chart, in either upper case (Å Ê Ñ Ø) or lower case (å, ê, ñ, ß, ø). There are more characters there than you may ever need. I presume that Apple has something similar.

Regards,

I was tempted to purchase the score to Arvo Part's "Fur Alina" (beautiful piece, everybody should check it out!). But I saw a preview of the score (just one page), and then got tempted to just write the rest of the piece out, given that I had also found some information about how the piece is structured.

Also on a Mac, you can open the Character Viewer and get all sorts of characters, just by double-clicking on them, so you can spell names like Dvořak properly.

What is this? What OS are you on?

The ASCII code for that is Alt + 132: ä. But you could also use the character map in Windows (if you are using Windows).

That has been in OS X for a long time. In Input Sources for the Language and Text control pane, have the Input menu show in the menu bar, and you get to choose the Character Viewer and the Keyboard Viewer.

About prices, I saw flute pieces (4 pages) for over 30 dollars!

Well, yes; but it's Dvořák, isn't it?

I said that you could, not that I did!

it seems easier to embed than to transpose this piece.

I stopped in Shattinger's (local sheet music store) today and saw several Editio Musica Budapest collections ranging from $55 to $121 (Harold in Italy). Music can be very expensive.

My teacher highly recommended the Editio Musica edition of Listz's Annee's de Pelerinage. I didn't like my Sauer edition and I always buy my scores so I looked for the Editio Musica on the internet. Just one "Annee" cost about $124.00 U.S! This one time I opted to print it out from IMSLP.

I suppose the cost of printing quality editions of classical musical scores is high and the demand is not huge, but music publishers are going to put themselves out of business if they keep charging exorbitant prices, especially if the scores are available on the internet for free.

Yes, many of the Editio Musica Budapest collections are on imslp and they are informative editions. I really wanted to treat myself, but couldn't justify it and left empty-handed.

I think you're a fan of Henle... their versions cost a more reasonable $25-$30 per Annee.

My Henle version of the 2nd year is 55 pages... According to sheetmusicplus.com, the Editio Musica edition for that year is 173 pages! Also it includes "works published for the first time from the composer's surviving manuscripts, as well as original versions of works that were published during Liszt's lifetime, but later reworked." And the opening page (available to preview on the website) is a "Sonate" in four flats, something not included in the standard editions of this work. It looks like you're getting an intense level of scholarship and background material for your $124, far more than from Henle.

-Jason

The most expensive editions of public domain music are usually scholarly editions, where they are charging for the research.

Damon! I love your new avatar!

I don't know about their current quality, but most of my older Editio Musica Budapest volumes were of poor printing quality. They fell apart quickly, and the paper of the covers was flimsy.

"Fur Alina" is anthologized in "A Century of Invention" by Maurice Hinson. It is a great book, and not very expensive.

Technology in our age, has helped reduce costs enormously.

* I'm not sure if there's a music publishing house that is still not using Finale/Sibelius.
* The digital printing (lazer printing), has reduced the need to actually print 10,000 books for every volume in order to save on films (in offset printing).
* Distribution is easier than it used to be and thank gawd for the internet, advertising is also much cheaper, especially for established houses.
* We do need to remember that almost all income from sales goes to the publisher. Royalties are what make a difference, and things do get divided in this case 50-50, but still this is not bad, considering the remaining admin fees (which generally will go to the publisher again).

Of course, and I know you know that Deborah (and most people here), the idea of a good published book is the quality of the paper, the printing and the binding, none of which can be reached by home technology; not unless you hold an A3+ (tabloit) printer, have access to paper vendors and want to spend all day printing a single darn copy!

If music publishers want to keep doing business by selling the good old B-B-B (Beethoven, Bach, Brahms) and hardly support any contemporary music, they're most welcome, to be honest. But the extremely high prices are not justified in my book! And it drives people away from contemporary music and composers!

That said, I've been told by European publishers that the price list of EMF is actually on the very cheap side. American distributors seem to largely disagree with that.

Almost went with my dog, instead. Artur is my piano hero.

Salabert

They hold sole copyright on some popular pieces, so they don't need to do anything to improve the print quality. Some of their music look like a copy of a copy of a copy that was made in the 1970's!! And they can charge $7.50 for a single sheet of paper. And it's not even good paper.

I agree. They are pretty cheap here though (probably for that reason). (Mine are not even that old, I bought them maybe 2-3 years ago.)

as couple things.. i love Fur Alina and fully support paying money to composers... what's money for anyway?

I can imbed now.. thanks

interesting read on tintinabulli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintinnabuli

I asked our local retailer about the high cost of European editions, and he said it was mostly due to shipping costs. If you could sell 10,000 copies of Boulez's second sonata, then it'd be quite a bit cheaper, but there are barely 10,000 people in the US who want to listen to it, much less try to learn it.