Richard Stallman made me change the name of my music project

What do music and software have in common, and how far can you apply the principles of the free software movement to the music industry? Those are questions that pianist Kimiko Ishizaka and I set out to answer in 2012 when we released the Open Goldberg Variations and again in 2015 with the Open Well-Tempered Clavier. Now, we are asking for support for our next big Bach project on Kickstarter.com.

All these projects focus on the “source code” of music written hundreds of years ago by J.S. Bach: newly typeset semantic MuseScore files for the written notes, and studio-grade master tracks for the audio recordings, with everything licensed under Creative Commons Zero for maximum reuse and distribution. The results have been excellent, with people enjoying easy and free access to this music and the ability to use it in their own works, which have included feature length films, YouTube videos, museum exhibits, advertisements for business, research projects, and more.

It isn’t completely an apples-to-apples analogy, though. There is no mechanism in our projects to preserve the license and apply it to derivative works. If someone uses our recording or arranges the MuseScore notes into another piece, there is no mandate that these new works also be released using permissive licensing. But the freedoms to obtain, read, modify, and distribute the source code for our music are analogous, and we’ve felt inspired and well supported by the free software scene since day one.

Kimiko has performed at numerous free software conferences and events — such as DrupalCon Prague, Observe.Hack.Make., RMLL, and Festival du Domaine Public — and our projects have been covered by the tech press. We even found a collaborative partner in the free software stalwart Michael Tiemann (of GCC and Red Hat fame) who brought us to his Manifold Studio twice for exciting music projects.

And yet, nothing screams “YOU MATTER TO FREE SOFTWARE” more than Richard Stallman writing to you personally.

My thoughts and feelings upon receiving this mail were, to be honest, mixed. On the one hand, I was absolutely thrilled that Dr. Stallman had heard of our project and recognized our effort to contribute to a free society. As a software developer, all of the meaningful code I have ever written is under the GPL, so I also owe a debt of gratitude to him for enabling my entire career. On the other hand, it’s a bit presumptuous and nitpicky to tell complete strangers that they should change the name of their music project based on semantics.

I was conflicted, so I didn’t answer the mail. I rationalized it and eventually forgot he had even written…

But what if Stallman is right? What if the words do matter? What if Open Goldberg Variations really is about preserving musical freedoms (access to copyright-free source code in written and acoustic form)? Would we be better served by a name that bears witness to these convictions? Does the word “open” carry enough philosophical payload to actually indoctrinate the people who encounter it, and bring them closer to a way of thinking that rejects dangerous ideas, like that DRM has to be baked into every protocol and device, or that end users have no rights regarding the media they choose to enjoy?

By the time Kimiko was ready to make her next recording, enough time had passed to chew on that mail from Stallman. I eventually felt he was indeed right. And so, when Kimiko recently performed at the RMLL conference in France, with RMS sitting in the audience, we announced that our next project would be called the Libre Art of the Fugue. Libre means liberty which means freedom, and it is the aspect of freedom that is most important to us in this endeavor.

Kimiko’s libre recording of Bach’s tragic final masterpiece will appear in September 2017, pending the successful results crowdfunding campaign. It will include Kimiko’s own completion of Bach’s work, which was left unfinished at the time of his death, and both the recording and the source code — the semantically meaningful MuseScore notation files — will be liberated from copyright and made accessible to anyone and everyone.

It is a small gesture, but it is also the right gesture. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and when one of those giants writes you to weigh in on your name choice and then shows up at your concert, you take notice.

Please back this project on Kickstarter.com, and help Kimiko Ishizaka grow the body of libre culture available. Help set Bach free.