The Mutopia Project was brought to my attention by Dr. Martens at the beginning of the semester, and I had forgotten about it until recently when I was trying to decide what to blog about. This website offers free sheet music that can be downloaded and printed out for several instruments: Piano, Voice, Guitar, Violin, and Organ, to name a few. As of this writing, they have 1496 pieces of music available. The site is constantly adding new pieces, and it is open for the public to contribute as well. They use a software called LilyPond to typeset the music. This software is designed to make the music easier to read and better to look at.
Overall, I think that this site is a wonderful way to make music available to the public. For those that are interested in finding a certain piece of music for a one-time occasion, this would be an excellent way to obtain the music in a relatively quick and easy way. Also, it would be great for piano teachers to direct their students to, if they did not have the money to go out and buy a copy of the music. The files are available as PDF, so you could save the music on your computer and come back to it at a later date.
However, there are a couple of major drawbacks to a website of this kind. First of all, the selection is limited. Since I have a background in piano, the selection of piano music was the one section that I looked at carefully. The selection does carry a lot of J.S. Bach’s music. However, there were only a couple of pieces available for other composers. In addition, some pieces did not have the whole piece available. For instance, there were some sonatas by Beethoven, where only one movement was available and not the other two. This could become an issue if someone was relying on this site for their music. Secondly, because several people are contributing to the site, there were differences in the quality of the editions. Some of the pieces had fingerings, dynamics, and other markings, while some of them had none. The quality of an edition of music is very important to the performer, so it would not be a site that could be relied on for quality music. Overall, I think that a site that has free sheet music is perfect for an amateur musician, but for a serious musician that needs quality music, it would not be a good resource.
