This is a demo test blog

How free is the music of Bach? Although it should certainly be free as in speech (libre), seeing as Bach published his works hundreds of years ago, the only available modern publications are often copyrighted by publishing houses, editors, typesetters, and music scholars. What about free as in beer, or gratis? Take a famous piece such as the Goldberg Variations, best know because of Glenn Gould and movies like Slaughterhouse Five and Silence of the Lambs. It's really hard to find truly good scores and recordings of the Goldbergs that are just free; free to download, listen to, perform, share, arrange, or mash up. And almost none of them are gratis. The Open Goldberg Project is solving this problem, at least in the case of the Goldberg Variations, while exploring the intersection between open source software, public domain, crowd sourced funding, and emergent web technologies for music. The primary goal of the project is to create a new edition of the score of the Goldbergs, as well as a new studio recording, played on the piano by Kimiko Ishizaka. Both the score and the recording will use the Creative Commons Zero tool to place them into the public domain, assuring that they'll both be free (gratis and libre) forevermore. The open source software connection comes from MuseScore - the GPL notation software that is being used to create the new edition. The team behind MuseScore.org (the open source project) and MuseScore.com (the company which supports the project) is using the Open Goldberg Project to demonstrate the power and flexibility of their notation software. By releasing the first ever "open source edition" of the Goldbergs, they hope to turn more people on to the power of MuseScore, thus bolstering the project while bringing Bach's notes to a wider audience. Since the document format of MuseScore scores is an XML variant suitable for describing music notation, the music will truly be open source when completed. The whole effort is being financed with a Kickstarter.com campaign. Kickstarter puts the powers of crowd sourcing to work for funding creative projects. A backer who pledges $25, for example, will receive a CD or a printed score of the Goldbergs when they’re finished. There are a variety of pledges, including a $300 level that lets the donor write a dedication for one of the 30 variations; the dedication will then appear in all digital and printed forms of the score and recording. Once both score and recording are produced, MuseScore.com has developed some neat technologies that can be put to use. They're pioneering new ways to embed music notation into websites, and then synchronize the scores with other rich media, like YouTube videos. The new Goldberg Variations score and recording will hopefully be the raw clay for many derivative artistic works and mashups. Websites like the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) will help with the distribution of the new works. Overall, the goal of the Open Goldberg Variations is to bring the music of Bach to as wide of an audience as possible. The convergence of open source, cutting edge web technologies, and fund raising tools such as Kickstarter is opening up a vast new range of possibilities for artists such as Ishizaka. It's exciting to see music and open source cross pollinating each other and generating mutual goodwill.