David, That is a good question. I can only tell you why in my case I have failed to produce the edition I wanted to produce perhaps above all else: the Cherbury lute book. I contacted the Fitzwilliam museum over two years ago with a project to put together a full facsimile with transcriptions in DVD format. Everything went fairly well, except that the museum was undergoing construction work, so I had about a year to wait and put things together. Otherwise, the museum was apparently very interested. The LSA was tentatively interested in publishing the DVD, Miles Dempster who was working on a similar project agreed to collaborate, and Matt Wadsworth even got the idea to produce a recording of all the unicas. Jacob Heringman, Nigel North and a couple more lutenists were to be involved. When the museum reopened I recontacted them to get the photographs and all fell apart: they wanted to send the book to the main Cambridge library for photographing, with a price tag of 5000 pounds. There was no garantee of quality, and the resolution was inferior to what I thought was necessary to ensure actual printing quality (1600 dpi). I offered to have another photographer do the job in-house - he worked for the Oxford libraries on medieval manuscripts, as well as other libraries around the world. So not an amateur. Importantly he had agreed to do the job for 4,000 dollars - about half-price - and I knew that I could check with him during the work to make sure the photographs were good. After that offer, the museum curator refused to communicate with me any further. Now perhaps I should have been foolish enough to pay the 7,000 dollars, and bite the bullet. Except that after I got the appalling pictures of the Dowland MS from the Folger library, I had complained very mildly, and their reaction had been to threaten me with no less than a copyrights law suit - obviously absurd, but painful nevertheless. So think what you want about this story, but don't say we don't try. Out of the 180 or so pieces in the book, about 70 to 80 have already been transcribed. It would only take a few weeks for a few copyists to finish the job and make that music available to everyone FINALLY. But this will not happen, in great part because of all the negativity that is currently affecting Internet publishing. In the end, I agree with you: WEB and electronic documents need to break new ground, but it is slightly unfair to claim that this is easy to do. best wishes, Alain
LGS-Europe wrote: >>To those of you who have expressed an interest in The John Wilson >>Preludes that I have started posting on <wwwGuitarLoot.co.uk> I am >> >> > >Why go through all this trouble when there's a beautiful edition available? >Diapason press (DP49, Utrecht) has an edition which includes the small but >readable facsimile as well as a modern transcription, excellently done by >Matthew Spring. >And on a more general note, whithout wanting to demean anyone's efforts, why >do many people on the net spend hours of typing in music that is readily >availble in good editions, facsimile and modern, while there is still music >waiting to be published that is left untouched by them? > >David > > >***************************************** >David van Ooijen >Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Http://home.planet.nl/~d.v.ooijen/ >***************************************** > > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > > >
