Thanks to Media Influencer, I stumbled on this CNET story on two Beethoven enthusiasts working to explore the unperformed archives of the composer’s work. Says CNET:
Mark Zimmer, a tax attorney in Madison, Wis., and Dutch composer Willem Holsbergen are the creators of the Unheard Beethoven Web site, a sprawling digital archive of unfinished, unrecorded and often unpublished work by one of classical music’s towering figures. With painstaking care, they’re systematically turning Beethoven’s most illegible scrawls into digital scores that can be downloaded and played by any computer, with the ultimate goal of bringing to life virtually every note the composer put to paper.
While the site seems to have slipped out of active updating (the last significant entry is from November 2004), it’s a fabulous example of the power of the Internet and technology on the long tail, that endless stream of creative works that aren’t perceived as valuable or profitable enough to find their way to recording or performance or even publication. With reduced production and distribution costs (okay, they aren’t live performances…but computer-music versions), even the most obscure works can find a moment to be heard.
While some scholars and performers might say that the unpublished and unperformed works were that way for good reason, it’s fascinating to watch the traditional filtering and authority system turned on its head. And, it’s fairly clear from the web site’s introductory text that that was entirely the point:
This website endeavors to make all of Beethoven’s unrecorded music readily accessible to the public. Now YOU may judge for yourself as to whether these pieces deserve a wider hearing and the ability to join the repertoire.
