The Musopen Kickstarter Collection (2012)

Musopen, Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Musopen String Quartet, Shelley Katz · 2012 · 1000 min

The recording that proved the idea. In 2010 Musopen asked Kickstarter for eleven thousand dollars to hire an orchestra and record some public-domain symphonies into the public domain — and got sixty-eight thousand, enough for the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, a string quartet and a pianist and a year of sessions. The result, released in 2012, is thirty-seven works: all four Brahms symphonies, Beethoven's Eroica and the Coriolan and Egmont overtures, Mendelssohn's Italian, Scottish and Hebrides, Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, Mozart's 40th, Vltava, Peer Gynt, seven Schubert sonatas, nine string quartets and a second, chamber-scale Goldberg. Sixteen and a half hours of the core orchestral repertoire that anyone may now use for anything.

Honest editorial: these are good, straightforward performances by a working orchestra recorded quickly, not reference readings — the Brahms is sturdy rather than searching, the quartets are the best of it. What they are is free, and for most of the uses people have (a film, a class, a slow Sunday) that is the whole question.

Chosen copy: Internet Archive item MusopenCollectionAsFlac, a 2012 mirror of the project's release re-encoded losslessly (the description says at 32 bits per sample, which is padding, not resolution) — 145 FLAC files in 37 work folders (Bach_GoldbergVariations/… … Tchaikovsky_SymphonyPathetique/…), 7.70 GB, about 16 h 40 min. The folder structure is part of the release and ships as-is in the multi-file torrent.

Checked against the project's own list of thirty-seven works in the item description: every work has its folder, and movement files inside each folder are numbered. The item's total is what the size guard measured. This is the largest thing on the site by a distance and a natural long-haul seed.

Two layers, both free:

• The compositions. Bach to Suk, the latest (Suk's Meditation, 1914) published inside the pre-1931 line; no edition or arrangement younger than that is involved.
• The recordings. Musopen released the project's recordings into the public domain on completion in 2012 — the stated purpose of the Kickstarter, carried on the Archive.org item as a Public Domain Mark. Musopen's own site is the reference for the dedication; the mirror's tag agrees with it. Performers credited from the project.