A year-old Kickstarter project to release a public domain score and studio recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations has finally wrapped up, and the copyright-free files are now available online.

Bach might have written his seminal work over 270 years ago -- meaning it has long been in the public domain -- but any recorded performances have their own copyright. It means that openly accessible recordings of centuries-old songs can be hard or impossible to find.

With that in mind, Robert Douglass and pianist Kimiko Ishizaka


asked Kickstarter for $15,000 (£9,500) to create a professional studio recording of the Goldberg Variations, and make them available for anyone to download, own and use without limitations.

After meeting their funding goal, Ishizaka has performed the music on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial piano in the Teldex Studio in Berlin. The recording was produced by Anne-Marie Sylvestre and the score, provided by Werner Schweer, was created using the MuseScore software.

The MuseScore team put the score out for a public three-month peer review period, so music enthusiasts and scholars around the world could validate the score before it was released and recorded.

The collection -- named The Open Goldberg Variations -- is now available to hear at Soundcloud, or download in a number of high quality formats. Best of all, it's available under the Creative Commons zero license, where work is dedicated to the public domain and all rights -- worldwide -- are waived so it can be freely copied, modified, distributed and performed. "The project has been a monumental success, and I hope you will agree with me that the results are most beautiful," Douglass wrote, on the Kickstarter's update blog. "Thank you to everybody who supported us."

Musopen -- a similar (and arguably more ambitious) project, which aimed to make public domain recordings of the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies is also nearing completion. On 22 May, the Kickstarter's organisers wrote, "editing is complete, we are now mixing the music and adding finishing touches."