On this day in the year 2010, I sent an email to a close group of family and friends announcing a new project, the Open Goldberg Variations, which would feature the piano playing of my wife, Kimiko Ishizaka, the technology of MuseScore.org, and a brave stance on the state of copyrights in music recording and publishing. From that moment, it took us 1 year, 7 months and 10 days to release the Open Goldberg Variations, after raising $23,748 from 406 backers on Kickstarter, meeting Anne-Marie Sylvestre, who would be the recording engineer on this and subsequent recordings, partnering with Bösendorfer, recording in the Teldex Studio in Berlin, and working closely with Werner Schweer and Thomas Bonte of MuseScore to craft a fine new public domain edition of the piece.
And then, we set Bach free with the Creative Commons Zero marker of public domain, waiving all copyrights whatsoever, with the hope that the music would reach a wider audience than ever before, inspire more projects to lean copyleft, and to let audiences hear the brilliance and beauty of Kimiko's interpretation.
After that, amazing things happened. We were featured in the New Yorker, Wired Magazie, the FAZ, Heise.de, The New York Times, the front page of Slashdot, and on BoingBoing. The YouTube video of the recording has 4.7 million views, and when people read about the Goldberg Variations on Wikipedia, they can listen to the recording that we produced. The music has been used in film and television, and we were even invited to perform in Canada for the Glenn Gould Variations - a conference to celebrate Gould's posthumous 80th birthday.
Radio history was made when Wisconsin Public Radio broadcast the entire Goldberg Variations while providing a website with the score that was synchronized in real-time with the radio broacast, so that anyone in the state could listen and watch at the same time.
The accessibility of music for blind pianists was addressed when we released a Braille edition of the score so that it could be read with a Braille reader.
We then went on to record the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, and The Art of the Fugue under the same model, for a total of over four hours of audiophile music added immediately to the world's cultural heritage. It has been a success beyond our wildest dreams.
We forgot about Forever
As the ten year anniversary of the release of the Goldbergs approaches, I've had two realizations about the project which are significant. First, there is a LOT of material we haven't released. This includes videos of recording sessions and concerts, photos, Kimiko's notes, various documents, and lots and lots of text.
Second, we've not done a proper good job of guaranteeing that this treasure of the public domain will be around forever, in its most pure and original form. I'll write more about this shortly, but suffice to say that it is not sufficient to depend on YouTube and Spotify, both of which are centralized platforms that extract rent on the artistic assets loaned to them, to be the stewards of these files forever and forever.
If we want guarantee that the Open Goldberg Variations will be freely available to humanity in 100 years and beyond, in their original best forms, we need to do more. We need to formalize The Archive.
And that is what the Forever Goldberg project is about. It is the creation of a freely accessible archive of all of the assets that belong to these three monumental Bach projects, and the creation of a governance mechanism that will survive well beyond the lifetimes of myself or Kimiko Ishizaka.
The Forever Goldbergs
The Forever Goldbergs will be an online archive, backed by IPFS and Arweave and/or Filecoin, which will decentralize and make permanent the vast archive of resources that we have created around this project. The archive itself will be a unique experience, intended to immerse fans, supporters and scholars into our world in the ten years it took to create these masterworks. The governance of the archive will aim to be autonomous and decentralized, and the treasury needed to provide stewardship will be filled through the sale of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that denote Proof-of-Stewardship of the archive.
I will be blogging here (on Peakd.com, part of the Hive.io network) regularly, with specific posts being cross posted on other sites as needed. As the skills needed to realize this project are currently FAR beyond what I possess, I will also be posting regularly about the things I'm learning. Stay tuned! It's going to be epic.