The fantastic news that all of Mozart’s music in edited scores has been put online hit the papers two days ago. It was made possible by a $400,000 grant paid to the publisher, presumably to cover lost royalties --as if anyone could possibly calculate such a thing. In any case, it was a matter of contract, so who can complain? It’s wonderful that it is all available.
Here is the site, which crashed hours after opening. Before discussing that, a note on the apparent restriction on the use of the music. The site says “The purpose of this web site operated by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use.” Then you have to agree not to make copies except for personal use.
Oh really! So we can’t, what?, sing in them in public? Perform them? Record them? How incredibly tedious this copyright business has become. How preposterous.
Then there is the issue of the software itself. What we have here on this site seems to be a classic case: a vast piece of software apparatus that surely cost tens of thousands but works not as well as any home-made free system based on data entries and mysql. It is very difficult to navigate, and very tricky to direct link to anything. If you use your back button, it will throw you to the opening German-language page. The scores themselves are not set for fastview, or so it seems, and take an age to pull from the database.
As for the global rush on the server, technology today should be able to withstand it, if a programmer knows what he or she is doing. I’ve seen homegrown systems based on open-source software as well as dot net systems that have withstood the highest traffic overload the web can provide (umm, Mises.org, for example).
You might think that $400,000 would buy the foundation a decent user interface, but no: it does seem true -- in specific cases -- that in the web world, the more money you spend, the worse the quality becomes. Why? Because people are attempting to purchase what money cannot buy: the good sense and programming skill that is required to make delivery intuitive for users.
Why can’t money buy it? Because there is a huge knowledge gap between those who do the programming work and those who are paying the bills, which is to say that those who are making the decisions on the use of resources are clueless about what they are actually paying for. This leads to a coordination problem.
In any case, here is one direct link you can see, if you are lucky: the Exultate Jubilate.
(Digg this post if you like it)
Note: Some of the embedded links in this article have been removed due to expired domains.
