Twice recently I’ve ordered sheet music for scores that are in the public domain. One for Bach’s Musical Offering and one (well, two) for the Sibelius Symphony No. 5, the full orchestral score and the piano reduction.
The Bach work is one I often listen to, passively but with inevitable moments of actively, and it’s also a notable work of creative notation. I wanted to look at the structure of the Ricercar a 6 which is a six-voice fugue performed (most of the time?) on keyboard–ouch!–but each piece in the set has its own interesting characteristics. I listened to the Kuijken/Kohnen/Leonhardt recording from 1975 growing up and so is the “official” one to my ear.
I’ve wanted to study the Sibelius symphony–considered one of the greatest symphonies ever written, ymmv–ever since I started working with orchestral composition. Public domain rules are byzantine and generally I think a score needs to be around 70 years old before it becomes available. Older scores I’ve looked at are notoriously badly edited (with questionable phrase markings or capricious choices of accidentals or just misprints, though not seeing more curated versions I may be wrong), so to mitigate any weirdness in the orchestral score I also got the piano reduction.
I first looked around for non-public-domain versions of each, but there was nothing that appeared of any quality that I felt would be greater than the PD versions, so I went that route.
I downloaded a PDF of the Sibelius orchestral score from IMSLP which has a scan from a Dover edition (also purchasable from sheet music sites) and one from some anonymous edition. I went with anonymous. I also downloaded a piano reduction from IMSLP which is arranged by Karl Ekman, who has also created arrangements for many Sibelius works (he has no English Wikipedia entry, just Finnish, Dutch, and Swedish).
For both of the Sibelius PDFs I went to the FedEx website. Besides there being a FedEx store right down the street from us their website tools are amazing. On their Copies & Custom Documents page you can upload a document and select features including binding (I went with spiral), cover color and material (blue vinyl), paper weight, etc. Not to be a geek, but it’s a pretty cool tool to use:
And with cool comes cost: the orchestral score is 136 pages and came to $37.15. The piano reduction is 51 pages and was $17.73. No regrets.
For the Bach, I also sourced it from IMSLP but instead of downloading and uploading to FedEx, I used IMSLP’s affiliate printing service at Performer’s Edition.
Unlike the many choices that FedEx offers, the only options available at Performer’s Editions are for the type of binding. I went with the “durable cover” for $9.99 total (the score is 56 pages). I’m not sure why I didn’t go with the “spiral binding and durable cover” for $12.99 because the results were greatly inferior to the FedEx printings. The blame is mine. While the spiral binding for the Sibelius works lay perfectly flat, the Bach work is almost unusable for how stiff it is. Below, you can see I have to hold it open because no matter how I work on loosening the stapled binding (which is not centered at all) it refuses to stay open without using my music stand clips. I hate to be wasteful, but I may just go with the FedEx printing for a new copy and toss this in the recycle bin.
The quality of some older scores notwithstanding, the public domain scores in general available at IMSLP are an amazing public good (the first reference I can find in my life is 15 years ago, way back in Oct 2007, when the site got taken down by the Public Domain Police). I recently ordered a Ferneyhough score–from Boosey & Hawkes–for his orchestral work La terre est un homme (see the bonkers first page here). After looking it up on a late-night whim, balking at the almost $100 price, but then getting an unexpected 20% off for Black Friday, I relented. Professionally-published scores will always be required in some instances.