Open Goldberg Variations

One of my favorite internet projects ever is the Open Goldberg Variations. This was a 2011 Kickstarter project to produce a studio recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and donate it to the public domain. The project was successfully funded, and both Ishizaka’s performance and the recording production are stellar.

I love how this project feels like it sits in the overlap of two of my loves: classical music and open source software. To quote myself from a 2021 interview I did with the Italian graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico:

I often day dream about ways the model of open source could be applied to crafts other than programming. For example, now that recorded music can be distributed at essentially zero cost, could passionate amateur musicians collaborate on musical recordings which they release directly into the public domain?

One of my favorite music projects is the Open Goldberg Variations, which was a Kickstarter campaign which raised $23,000 to make an exquisite studio-quality recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations which was released into the public domain.

Having this recording in the public domain means that it can be used as source material for all kinds of non-commercial art projects. For example, there’s a whole ecosystem of people on Youtube using this recording to create beautiful computer visualizations which lay bare the intricate complexity of Bach’s composition.

You can find the project and its associated recordings at https://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/

Or listen on Youtube: