Posted by Brian Frederiksen on January 19, 2003 at 20:35:33:
In Reply to: CD rom Excerpts posted by Mike Johnson on January 19, 2003 at 16:49:25:
I just received Gordon Cherry's Excerpt collection today - WOW!
For years I have copied most every orchestral part I could get my hands on and have a few three ring binders full of parts plus excerpt books. Like a lot of us, I have a lot of time and money invested in this. Most works are under public domain which is ideal for digitizing - I have given thought to this but Gordon Cherry did it!
One problem about doing a disk of material in the public domain is under whose rules make it public domain. Each country has their own laws and a disk must be made for that country. A few years ago the U.S. changed their laws covering material 70 years after the composer's death. Canada's laws are different. For this reason Gordon has made a Canadian version and U.S. version. As a dealer, I can only sell within the U.S. - sorry Mike, you have to wait until a UK version comes out!
This is a Low Brass collection, that means all trombone and tuba parts. There are no plans for making a tuba only edition. The files are .pdf format and require Adobe Acrobat to view and print. You can specify what pages of a particular work to print so only tuba parts can be printed. If you desire, you can print one page at a time and do double sided printing.
While the music is public domain, the cost of production is in the scanning, organization and CD burning. Realize, there are over 5000 pages - Gordon hired someone to spend hours with a scanner. He is treating this like software and upgrades will be available for registered users. This could be from a compser whose music just became public domain or something that they have added on. He recently came up with an update for those who have previously purchased it. The disk I have has that update.
All of this costs $89, a real bargain. For those of you coming to DC, I loaded a demo copy on my computer. Come over and see it. It is great having all of this on my computer, much simpler than the books. I'm even thinking of selling some of my excerpt books, why do I need the 10 volume Brown books when I have this!