San Francisco Classical Voice

Today's (and the year's best) WebMusic tip: Would you like to download Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite free and easy... and legally? A magnificent organization by the name of Project Gutenberg makes that possible, providing free access to thousands of books on-line, including many books on music. The books are in text format, which means small files, quick downloads, and the ability to read the books with any online display editor on any platform.

For information about Project Gutenberg, go to http://promo.net/pg/ and use the index to find authors or titles. To download the Shaw book, you have the option of getting the 245Kb text file at Shaw.txt (and then use File => Save As, making sure that you keep the .txt extension) or the 98Kb zip file at Shaw.zip. For small books such as this, the text format is fine, but when you are getting War and Peace (Compressed.Tolstoy), the zipped version makes more sense. Of course, when you opt for zip, you must go through the extra step of unzipping the file; if you don't have an application for that, try the evaluation copy from www.winzip.com/ or www.pkware.com.

If you run into an access problem, note that there are many "mirror sites" available from the main page, and you can always try another server on the Gutenberg "network." Look for the Select Another FTP site strip near the bottom of the main page, click on the down-arrow on the right to see what File Transfer Protocol sites are available.

Studying Beethoven? For superb original material, in Friedrich Kerst's Beethoven, The Man And The Artist, As Revealed in His Own Words , Gutenberg is at your service: BeethovenBio. For another source of original research material, check out Charles Ives' Essays Before a Sonata, insightful thoughts about Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau, serving as a humongous set of program notes for his Second Piano Sonata — at IvesEssays.

Gutenberg also offers some MIDI files (Beethoven's Fifth, Haydn's 104th symphonies among them), but I had trouble playing these files after downloading them — you may have better luck. No problem at all with Oscar Wilde's Symphony in Yellow, a poem in the Charmides collection, at Wilde. There are music texts as well, some rather exotic, from Cavalier Songs And Ballads Of England from 1642 to 1684 (Ballads) to the original Beggar's Opera (BeggarsOpera).

Thirty years ago, Carnegie-Mellon professor Michael Hart digitized and put on-line the Declaration of Independence, followed by the US Constitution, and then created Project Gutenberg to realize an extraordinary plan — make all literature available to all people. It was tough going — as recently as 1991, there were only 18 eText/eBook files available — but matters speeded up considerably, producing 18,000 such files today in just one index (The Internet Public Library), all free for the taking. The project's aim is to give away one trillion e-text files by the end of this year. Sometime in December, on a date yet to be selected, Gutenberg will establish a new kind of "book-burning" record by coordinating a worldwide downloading of its files to create CDs for giveaway, each holding 40,000 titles. The ultimate purpose of the project is to provide 18 million titles in a box of CDs, at the cost of about $1,000, and distribute them all over creation — a singular effort to marry literature and technology for the benefit of all in a volunteer, nonprofit venture.