IMSLP Forums

I was thinking it would be very useful if we could have a new time period, namely "Living Composers" - which will have the oldest composer's birth date as a starting date, and it would extend to today.

It would be very interesting to be able to browse through scores of living composers, see who is sharing scores, get in touch with composers, commission pieces etc.

It would also be interesting to have the ability to choose, say, "PD in US", "PD in Canada" or "PD in Europe" (and/or any other major countries with significantly different copyright terms), and then browse normally through the website, but only the scores that are public domain in the selected copyright will be shown. Kind of like a tag, but for individual pieces, or even for individual scores within pieces (so, say, if a particular edition of a Beethoven symphony was not PD in europe, and it was tagged "Non-PD EU" (as it should be), then that tag would also carry with it a piece of code that, if "PD Europe" was chosen before browsing, upon reaching that page, it would not display the particular edition in question).

This would simplify things a lot, and make it easier for people who are particularly looking for music they can perform/edit/arrange/whatever, and don't want to waste time going through heaps of scores which might not be in the PD in their country.

Well, http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Non-Publ ... _Composers has all of our living composers, plus a couple (like Tui St. George Tucker and Leo Ornstein) who are recently deceased. While a new time period (IMO, it should be 'Contemporary') may be in order, until that is instituted, you could use that category as a good replacement.
Your second idea would be an excellent extension, but probably very difficult to implement. Partly, that's because there will be files with different copyright statuses linked to from one work page (probably mostly for arrangements). So the code would need to check whether there were any files on a page which fit the conditions; if so, it would show only the appropriate files, and if not, the work page would be hidden. (And by extension, if there was nothing appropriate in the composer category, that would likewise be hidden.) So it seems to me that it would make browsing the site pretty slow, although obviously I don't know the code so I can't say anything with authority.

Yeah, "Contemporary" sounds good. I've also mentioned how I dislike the use of "Modern" to signify anything after 1945, as I think "Modern" comes with particular connotations and associations in mind (the modernist movement), which pretty much finished at about 1945, and the "post-modern" (among many others) began at about that time. I think it would be best to stick to words signifying specifically time periods, so if we have "Early C20th" from 1900 to 1945, we could have "Late C20th" for anything after 1945, and "Contemporary" for living composers (who would be moved to "Late C20th" when they die) (or "Early C21st")

That's exactly what I mean with the second idea - and I am not sure about slow browsing. I mean, potentially, if such a script were to be written, it could be so that it is run once a day and creates a catalogue, and then people just browse these compositions normally, with a note saying that scores uploaded within the last 24h will not appear where they belong.