The Werner Icking Music Archive (often abbreviated WIMA) is a web archive of liberally licensed

sheet music Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses List of musical symbols, musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chord (music), chords of a song or instrumental Musical composition, musical piece. Like ...

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

music. The scores are electronically typeset by volunteers and distributed in

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

, often accompanied by their typesetting files. WIMA continues the defunct GMD Music Archive and is named after its founder, the late Werner Icking. After a merge completed in 2012, the archive forms part of the

International Music Score Library Project The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a subscription-based digital library of public-domain music scores. The project, which uses MediaWiki software ...

(IMSLP).

History

Icking's original archive at the GMD (

Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...

) in Germany was the oldest online collaborative distribution site for music scores. Following Icking's death in 2001, the administration of the site was taken over by Danish composer and computer programmer Christian Mondrup. Renamed as the Werner Icking Music Archive in honour of its founder, the site was transferred to the Department of Computer Science (DAIMI) at the

University of Aarhus Aarhus University ( da, Aarhus Universitet, abbreviated AU) is a public research university with its main campus located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Gr ...

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark ...

. By February 2010, the university could no longer host it and Mondrup opted for a commercial web host sponsored by the Danish firm Paldam IT. WIMA offers primarily

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

and

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

music, but the archive also contains jazz scores. WIMA is also the home site of

MusiXTeX MusiXTeX is a suite of open source music engraving macros and fonts that allow music typesetting in TeX, released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. History Macros for typesetting music in TeX first appeared in 1987 (MuTeX) and were limited to ...

, a suite of open source music typesetting utilities based on the typesetting system

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

. The majority of the compositions represented in WIMA are

early music Early music generally comprises Medieval music (500–1400) and Renaissance music (1400–1600), but can also include Baroque music (1600–1750). Originating in Europe, early music is a broad musical era for the beginning of Western classical m ...

. Some of the early music scores published in WIMA are the first modern editions of these compositions. A number of contemporary composers have chosen to publish their works in WIMA. The older music offered in WIMA is out of

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

Werner Icking

The mathematician and computer scientist Werner Icking (25 June 1943–8 February 2001) spent a large part of his career at the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, a national research centre for applied mathematics and computer science in

Sankt Augustin Sankt Augustin ( Ripuarian: ''Sank Aujustin'') is a town in the Rhein-Sieg district, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is named after the patron saint of the Divine Word Missionaries, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). The Missionaries esta ...

, Germany. (The GMD was later absorbed into the

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...

.) He not only played a key role in the development and distribution of MusiXTeX software, but also produced new editions of music by baroque composers, most notably the complete

Urtext edition An urtext edition of a work of classical music is a printed version intended to reproduce the original intention of the composer as exactly as possible, without any added or changed material. Other kinds of editions distinct from urtext are facs ...

s of

Bach Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard w ...

's works for solo violin and cello. He had played the violin since he was a child and for a time was first violin in the Chamber Orchestra of the Musikschule der Bundesstadt Bonn (City of Bonn Music School). Icking died at the age of 57 in a cycling accident while returning home from work. Several original compositions on the Werner Icking Music Archive are dedicated to his memory. His academic publications included: *''BITS programmer's guide'', Issue 15 of Institut für Software Technologie (St. Augustin), 1973 *''GMDTEXT: eine Texter-Verpackung Benutzeranleitung'' (Volume 197 of ''Arbeitspapiere der Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung'', GMD, 1986 *"MuTeX, MusicTeX, and MusiXTeX" in Eleanor Selfridge-Field (ed.) ''Beyond MIDI: The handbook of musical codes'', MIT Press, 1997, pp. 222-231.

IMSLP merge

On August 23, 2011, an announcement was made that the Werner Icking Music Archive would merge with

(IMSLP). WIMA had announced the merge on its own site five days before in an open letter to contributors. After working out some technical issues, IMSLP decided to officially commence the merge on August 28. On July 21, 2012, the merge project was reported officially complete. Since then, virtually the entire collection of WIMA forms part of IMSLP.

References

{{Reflist

External links

The Werner Icking Music Archive
Online music and lyrics databases Discipline-oriented digital libraries German music websites

History

Werner Icking

IMSLP merge

See also

References

External links