IMSLP and the State of the Arts worldwide

As many of the people who would read this blog would be interested in classical music and websites regarding it, there is or now was this very good collection of free scores on the Internet called the Internet Music Scores Library Project. http://imslp.org/wiki/
They have recently been put out of action by the actions of a cease and desist letter from Universal Edition. The scores in question are by Mahler, R. Strauss, Respighi, Berg, Friedman, Janacek, Schoenberg, Bartok, Marx, Szymanowski and von Zemlinski. Only one of these composers, Marx, is still in copyright in Canada, where IMSLP is based.
Matthew and I have been discussing this and have agreed to a boycott of all Universal Edition products. We hope you will join in our boycott of Universal Edition products.
This leads us to the second point in this blog entry, the State of the Arts worldwide.
The Arts are incredibly undervalued worldwide. Just in Victoria, the State Government is pretty much trying to kill MYM, which is a highly worthwhile program for young musicians. The attack from UE on IMSLP is another great example.
I believe the Arts should be much more valued than they already are. Look at the comparative budgets for sport and Arts and see what I mean!

THE OFFICAL RANKINGS: Revised

Welcome to the revised edition of the Term 3 - Term 4 holiday break music poll and listings. As you may have noted by scrolling down, there have been some big changes with Stuart's inclusion in the listings (even though he was still rather late!). These are the definative, universally accepted rankings of all which are ranked, and have been offically approved by Gramaphone and The Penguin Gyde. Anyway now onto the results. I thought it would make more sense to put the composer list down first, so here it is.

The winner of the inaugural "The Offical Best Composer Ever Award" goes to GUSTAV MAHLER who was well clear of Ludwig van Beethoven in 2nd place and Dmitri Shostakovich who has had a shocking vote in 3rd place.

Now to the symphonies list. This was a particularly close, and where there was once a tie there is an outright winner. Symphony No.6 by Gustav Mahler has triumphed over Symphony No.13 by Dmitri Shostakovich by 2 points as shown below.

Now to the concerti. With Stuart's vote Sergei Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto jumped to second place, but Dmitri Shostakovich still has the edge with his 1st Cello Concerto.


Now to the all important orchestral works. Stuart has again dramatically changed the vote, with the beautiful and touching "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" by Penderecki tieing with "Night on A Bald Mountain" by the highly modest Mussorgsky.

Now we come to a rather failed Chamber Works vote, with nobody having any works in common except the String Quartet No.8 by Shostakovich which therefore won by default.

Now to the all important conductors list which, although should have been won by the spectacular conductor Vernon Handley, was won in a tie by Claudio Abbado and Bernard Haitink.
Now to the offical overrated composers list. Here we had a predictable winner - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!

Well that's it folks for the very first poll. Before the next poll, I would like to have a name for it. Please choose out of one of the 4 below, or you may nominate your own name if you wish. Something related to music must be the subject of the title.

- The Alpmusic poll
- The Paul Jones Music Poll
- The Big Music Poll
- The Happy Forest

Thank you for all who was a part of this poll.

Harry Sdraulig
Poll Organiser