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Here you will find my free transcriptions of public domain sheet music. These scores come in several formats, depending on when they were transcribed.This paragraph is mostly so search engines will find me.
You will also find some music written by me.
Why do I present these files? Several reasons: I always hate it that I can never find a decent string quartet when I look for one. If there's a(n uncopyrighted) piece of music out there, I ought to be able to find it. I think that anyone ought to have access to Beethoven and Mozart and the like (actually, this ought to apply to away from the internet, too, but I don't have the resources to dedicate to that). I also think that, although Noteworthy Composer does have a number of limitations, most of these are relatively minor and can be worked around. I am promoting this product because it really is a great deal; you get a near-professional music program for less than a computer game. And it prints some very nice scores, particularly if you take the time to add special touches. Lastly, I am in the process of inputing these scores for my own use, and once they're in it takes very little effort to share them with you (plus, I then have an off-site archive which is very useful in case of flood, fire, earthquake, etc.)
Since this website's inception, I have moved away from using microsoft windows on a regular basis; I currently use Gentoo Linux almost exclusively. Therefore, I generally don't have access to Noteworthy Composer. So, I use another program, Lilypond. It is text-based, so the files are plain, ASCII text (unless they need to be unicode for some reason, like non-Roman characters) that you run through Lilypond to get out printable music, for example, in PDF. I enter the scores by hand, currently, because there is no notation editor (like Sibelius or Noteworthy) that I find suitable yet. Some people like Rosegarden, though. Lilypond is available for Windows, Linux/Unix/BSD, and OSX (Mac), so give it a try!
The music—except for my own—is in the public domain to the best of my knowledge. These particular files are released either into the Public Domain (PD) or licensed by me to you with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC). Attribution can be satisfied by retaining the transcriber's name (G. Lehr) and the link back to http://www.emeraldimp.com/
Some files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Some files are licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License.
The Noteworthy Composer files do not bear the appropriate licensing notices in the files themselves; this is because I don't have a copy of NWC installed at the moment. They are still licensed as noted below.
I may include links to other files, for example fonts; these are not mine to license, though I believe that I may distribute them. You've been warned. :-)
Here's all that I ask, and this is merely a request, you are (of course) under no obligation to do so, but if you have sheet music that is not copyrighted or that the copyright has expired on (I'm thinking mainly of classical stuff), then enter it in and send a copy to me (jademystery AT hotm-ail DOT com [you'll have to remove the '-']), the NWC Scriptorium or the Mutopia Project. There's so much music out there, so much that can be shared with the world! Thank you. *steps down off soapbox*
To download the files, you may right-click on the link and choose Save (Link) Target As..., or, if you have the plugins installed (note that the Noteworthy plugin does not work in IE 6!), you can simply click on the link and the pieces will come up in your browser window. You can find the Sibelius plugin, Scorch, at Sibelius' downloads section and the Noteworthy Composer plugin at Noteworthy's download section. You can then go to the file menu and choose Save (Page) As... to save the file to your hard drive.
Please note that there isn't (to my knowledge) a plugin that will allow you to view Lilypond files in your browser. However, I will try to include PDFs of all the files, which will allow you to at least view the pieces. You can download the Adobe Acrobat Reader at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html
Noteworthy Composer files can also be found at the Noteworthy Scriptorium, while eligible (that is, public domain or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike) Lilypond files can be found at the Mutopia Project. Additionally, you may be interested in the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), which contains scans of many pieces of music.
