Violent Entity Music Project

The latter half of the Middle Ages (circa 1000 CE to 1500 CE) was a turning point in European history. Having finally emerged from the Dark Ages (circa 500 CE to 1000 CE), European civilization finally began to recover the ground it had lost when Rome fell. One of the results of this recovery was the re-emergence of recorded music, or sheet music in both religious and secular life.

During the Middle Ages, Catholicism was the central power in Europe. It was incorporated into every aspect of life and its power stretched to every corner of the known world. And one of the methods through which the Church asserted its power was music. Although modern churches regularly use music as a natural part of worship, the pairing of music and Christianity has not always been so straightforward. A thousand years ago, music was often regarded as sinful. The problem was, churchgoers tended to enjoy it, and the fathers of Catholicism understood that it could be used to strengthen people’s ties to the Church.

Accordingly, music was eventually incorporated into Catholic worship, and vise versa. The sheet music of the era is often adorned with religious frescos. The monasteries and abbeys of the period created and stored huge quantities of sheet music, up to 4000 texts at a time in some cases. Indeed, it was this mass production of recorded music that led to the evolution of square notation. The monks needed a universal way to record and recognize the music written by their peers in other monasteries; square notation made this possible.

However, church was not the only place a person living in the Middle Ages would hear music, not by a long shot. Also common at the time were wandering poets, or troubadours, who were the keepers and purveyors of secular music. Some of the oldest surviving sheet music was written by these people, who were encouraged in their work by patrons such as Eleanor of Aquitaine. The area of Provence, modern day southern France, was particularly known for its troubadours, and the region is said to have been known as The Land of Song.

The Church is known to have fought the advent and proliferation of secular music, which it would certainly have regarded as sinful in the extreme. However, fortunately for us, it was unable to stem the music’s spread. The most popular topic of such secular music was that of courtly love, which may explain why the Church was so against it. Courtly love deals with situations in which lovers are unable to consummate their feelings, usually because one or both is wed to another. This theme is still famous today thanks to the well-known story of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot. Other popular secular topics included the seasons, the crusades, beautiful women, and nature, all of which were idealized and exalted in song. Such songs would never have become as ubiquitous as they were, however, without the sheet music produced by the troubadours of the age.

Encouraging your child to learn to play a musical instrument is a lovely gesture. Granted not all children are interested in learning how to play the guitar, the violin or the piano, but if they are, it’s nice if a parent can present opportunities for them to pursue that. If your child is interested in learning the guitar, it’s a good idea to find some sheet music for guitar that is at the playing level they’re at.

Traditionally people who wanted to learn and play the guitar were restricted to purchasing books filled with music. Many sheet music for guitar books may have included dozens of songs by a particular artist or they centered on a specific theme such as summer songs or holiday tunes. Now it’s a bit different, as you can find all kinds of sheet music for guitars on the Internet.

The first thing to do when looking for music is to determine what level the person playing the instrument is at. Obviously you don’t want to give complicated sheet music for guitar that includes many notes and a fast tempo to a beginning player. They would struggle with this and more than likely it would frustrate them. Instead choose music that complements their current ability.

One way to get a child, in particular, to practice more is to give them songs that they enjoy. If you give a child sheet music for guitar that is for a song they’ve never heard of, they are less likely to want to practice it. However, if you find songs that they listen to on the radio or have sung in school, they are going to want to master those. They’ll want to learn them quickly so they can impress not only their friends, but themselves.

Asking the child what songs they dream of playing is a good start. If they tell you a song that you know is beyond their current playing ability, encourage them to keep practicing and suggest other songs that you know they enjoy.

Also, explain to the child that they don’t need to learn the entire song in one sitting. If they are working on a specific chord with their guitar teacher and they take a few days or weeks to learn that, reward them by telling them how proud you are. This will be the impetus they need to continue learning until they can play the entire song all at once.

Once the child feels very comfortable, they can begin to play songs that are a bit more difficult. Purchasing new sheet music for guitar for them as they progress from one playing level to another is the perfect way to constantly show them you believe strongly in their ability.

The search “free sheet music” (without the inverted commas) on google spews out an impressive 17,300,000 pages. Even the most inexperienced internet-user will immediately realize that the truth cannot be quite so bountiful. I click on the first hit on google (results on yahoo and msn will differ) and am promised thousands of downloadable scores. On closer inspection this turns out to be a number of Irish tunes at most, with most of the promised pieces in fact consisting of links to more so called “free sites”. Funnily enough the owner of the website at one point even points out not to send him any nasty e-mails about the lack of free scores on the site.

So let’s try the second hit. After navigating round the site promising me free scores, I always end up on a page telling me that all of these scores are free to download – for a small fee of 20 Dollars a year. As a user I am starting to feel confused – I haven’t seen a single piece of sheet music. Can I trust this site? What would the quality of the scores be if I paid the 20 Dollars?

Frustrated, I move on to the next search engine result. This site at least has the courage to tell me on the main page that the so-called free scores will cost me 30 dollars a year, yet once again, I fail to detect a single quaver or treble clef. No scores are available for preview. This is starting to remind me of the “free DVD” I get with my Sunday paper. Only that I have to purchase the Sunday paper first.

Yet another site turns out to be just like the first, the promised pieces of sheet music being links to more so-called free sheet music sites. I am starting to get bored of being re-directed. Aren’t there any sheet music sites out there?

The story of my search continues in similar fashion, until I encounter a site that does offer sheet music, albeit a limited quantity. I download a score only to find that the graphics aren’t quite where they should be, and this makes me wonder about the general quality of the scores and the arrangements that are available. Indeed. Why should anyone create a score and put any effort into the arrangement and editing, if they aren’t making any money through direct sales?

Even other hits take me to a site where I am charged $1.60 for the “privilege” of downloading a badly scanned copy of a Bach composition. Hm.

Frighteningly, I also find a site that offers extremely basic versions of John Lennon’s “Imagine” and other music that is in fact still under copyright. This website is clearly an illegal operation, and one that might find itself in the crosshairs of the Music Publishers’ Association (MPA). The MPA, as highlighted in a recent article on the BBC Website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4524086.stm) is intending to clamp down on websites selling music still under copyright, or where the arrangements are still under copyright. In a way the publishing world is doing what record labels started a few years ago by actively prosecuting those participating in illegal download of sheet music.

I eventually find a project similar to the Gutenberg Project where people contribute scores freely. The quality seems ok, but I am restricted to pieces by a handful of classical composers, and with anything relying on donations and free contributions, I doubt there are regular updates. However, as with Wikipedia, the authenticity of the product has to come into question. The standard review process that an encyclopaedia has and Wikipedia and other websites dependent on volunteers lack will have to be considered when downloading scores (or any other information for that matter) for free: does the end-user believe all the notes are accurate? When the founder of Wikipedia himself was found to manipulate information on the very site how much can these so-called democratic sites be trusted? Obviously no one would benefit from changing a note in a score, so no one would deliberately manipulate a piece of music. But what are the skill levels of those involved in the creation of these scores? It is highly unlikely that a trained musician would edit these – he would be destroying his own industry to a certain extent. Furthermore I will not be able to find simplified arrangements of a piece, as this is a time-consuming effort, and anyone engaging in such an operation would clearly charge for the service.

After many days of searching, I give up in my quest in search of good free scores.

But what is one to make of all this? Why are there so many sites that don’t actually sell anything, and what is the point of them?

The problem is created by advertising. The people who run these sites own the most obvious url titles (i.e. the web site address) that one might type in when looking for free scores. As an example: if you were looking for free glasses, one might type in www.freeglasses.com. Hence, these sites get a lot of direct traffic. Furthermore they have also done a very good job at search engine optimisation, which makes you wonder whether google and Co are actually missing a trick here. Yet as these sites have nothing to sell they try and get the frustrated user to click on one of the many adverts, and many of these are so-called google ads. Every time someone clicks on one of these ads or paid-for links, the aforementioned website earns a small amount of money (so-called click-through). What is even more disconcerting is that some of these ads lead to legitimate sheet music download sites, making it even harder for the user to distinguish between the real thing and some dodgy operation trying to make a buck on click-throughs. This clearly does not help the industry.

Well, what about those free scores then? Well, there are some out there, basically a handful to be found on the five or six legitimate sites that are out there. These sites have the highest quality in terms of the arrangements, the quality of the score both graphically and in print-out quality.

So why no free scores?

Think about it: why should anyone go through the effort of either A) scanning hundreds and thousands of pages of music, and then offering them for free?

Or

B) creating hundreds and thousands of arrangements for free?

Exactly. If you were to upload loads of tunes, you’d want to make money out of it.

Lincoln Jaeger