Universal Edition, a music publisher based in Europe, where copyright laws tend to be stricter, threatened a cease-and-desist order against the site for copyright violations in October 2007. “It is that profit that helps us to continue to bring out more composers’ work.” “I don’t know if I would call it a threat, but I do believe it hurts sales,” said Ed Matthew, a senior promotion manager at G.

While a boon to garret-living, financially struggling young musicians, the library has caught the attention of music publishers. Guo, now a 24-year-old Harvard law student. The score library project has turned classical music into the latest wrestling mat for conventional information purveyors - newspapers, book publishers, record companies - and the new digital forces, like Apple, e-book sellers, music-sharing sites and Mr. A set of parts for a mainstream string quartet, for example, can run from $30 to $50.

The prices of major publishing houses range widely depending on the number of instruments in the work or its length. And through a partnership with a freelance musician in Indiana who runs a publishing business, it offers low-cost, on-demand printing of the music, often at a tiny fraction of the cost of standard editions. The site has recently begun adding recordings. Quality control - like catching missed pages - is also left to the public. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. The site () is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.

That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month.

The site, the International Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Humanity’s musical treasures - Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like - come to life in performance.

Imslp org petrucci music library