Monday, October 26, 2009

Check This Out! - Musopen

I came across Musopen a while back while compiling my "Listening Room" project. It is full public domain downloads of classical music, that can be used for various projects. From the website:

Musopen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. We want to give the world access to music without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.
Public domain works are not protected by U.S. copyright law and are free to be used, copied, performed and distributed by anyone for any purpose, even if sold for profit.

I've been finding various ways to use this website in my lessons. One of my students is using My First Piano Adventures, and really enjoys learning about all of the composers! She told me that she listens to the corresponding CDs every night while she goes to sleep, and she was very disappointed to find out that Book C didn't have a CD with it. So, what did I do? As we've been studying the various composers, we've been going to Musopen and creating a CD of their works! Problem solved!

I hope that some of you find this resource as useful as I do... It was just too cool not to share!

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