Open Goldberg Variations (2012)

Kimiko Ishizaka, Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Douglass · 2012 · 82 min

The first recording ever crowd-funded to be given away. In 2011 the pianist Kimiko Ishizaka and the MuseScore team asked Kickstarter for money to record Bach's Goldberg Variations in a proper studio and put the result — the recording and a new engraved score — into the public domain under CC0, so that no one would ever again have to ask permission to use a performance of the most famous keyboard work in the repertoire. They raised it, recorded at Teldex in Berlin in early 2012, and released it that May. It is on Wikipedia's Goldberg Variations article because it is the one performance Wikipedia is allowed to embed.

None of which would matter if the playing were merely worthy, and it is not. Ishizaka takes the repeats, keeps the ornamentation clean, and plays the Aria's return as a real ending rather than a formality. Eighty-two minutes, thirty-two movements, 24-bit files from the master.

Chosen copy: Internet Archive item OpenGoldbergVariations — 31 FLAC files (Aria, thirty variations, Aria da capo), 1.39 GB, 1 h 22 min, with the project's PDF booklet and cover. Track files are numbered 01–31 in two naming conventions (the last two files' names are compacted); the numbering is contiguous and sorts correctly.

Checked against the work's structure: 32 movements in 31 files (the opening and closing Arias bracket thirty variations). The collection also holds a 181 MB MP3 mirror (The_Open_Goldberg_Variations-11823); the 24-bit FLAC set is the release.

Two layers, both free:

• The composition. Bach, published 1741; no copyright anywhere.
• The recording. Released 2012-05-28 under CC0 1.0 Universal — a public-domain dedication by the performer and producers, stated on opengoldbergvariations.org and carried as the Archive.org item's licence URL. No rights are reserved; no attribution is required, and Ishizaka, Douglass and the studio are credited here because house style credits people regardless. The score published alongside is under the same dedication.