But oh well, just go back to the index at the top of the page, or scroll down to find answers to all you ever wondered about but were afraid to ask ;-)

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Technical problems

Problems with printing the music, with hearing the midis, with...?
Please contact me at frnordbe@online.no

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Where do I find the sheet music?

Stupid question? Not at all! Musica Viva has grown so big anyone can get lost!

Sheet music at Musica Viva: Go to The Free Sheet Music Archives and click on the category of your choice. You will then either get a list of the music in that category, or a couple of menus to let you narrow down the choices even further. Some of the lists are terribly long, so you might want to try the search engine instead.
Sheet music at other sites: Try The Free Sheet Music Directory. It's one of the largest - and by far the most consise - directory of sheet music sites on internet. If you have a more speific idea of what you're looking for, you should try the search engine
The search engine: There's a search box at the top of most every page at Musica Viva. You can use that to do a keyword search (composer, title instrument...) for sheet music from Musica Viva and a number of other sites.

Some of the titles are available in PDF format. These are quite simple to download. Just right click on the "PDF" link at the bottom of the page (Macintosh users: click and hold) and save the file on your computer.

The GIF files are harder to download, but there are ways to do it:

Save the GIFs the same way you save any other graphics from the web. You'll have to add the title etc. yourself afterwards.
If you have a modern postscript printer, you can use the print-to-disk function to create a PDF file from the page.
If you have a Macintosh computer: Take a "snapshot" of your screen by pressing shift-cmd-3. There might be ways to do this on a Windows computer too, but I don't know about it.

Why did you make this site?

Don't know, really. I have a rather large collection of Finale-files, written for myself or my students. And I was trying to learn a bit more about internet-graphics and about automatization of computer-routines, so I thought: Why not? Besides, it's time that those music publishers charging big money for old music that hardly costs them anything to print, got some competition!

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Who is Musica Viva for?

Everybody who loves music, basically. But of course, I'm a music teacher myself, and much of the content is music I've used for teaching myself. So maybe Musica Viva is most suitable for other teachers. I don't know, really.

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What does "Viewable with any browser" really mean?

That's a very good question, and not easily answered.

A good old-fashioned text-only browser can't show any graphics at all. This includes, of course, the music in the sheet music archives. There is simply no way around that. But the rest of Musica Viva (including the music in ABC format) works fine on that kind of browsers, of course.

Microsoft, and to some degree Netscape, frequently introduces "features" in violation of the official HTML (web page) standard. This is partly to introduce new ideas, partly because of errors (though you'll never get 'em to admit that), but also I'm afraid attempts to force websurfers to use one particular brand of browser.

So:
Musica Viva sticks strictly to the offical HTML 3.0 definition. It is fully compatible with any later version of HTML. Apart from non-critical page layout details it is compatible with HTML 2. The parts of Musica Viva that do not require a graphics enabled browser is also compatible with HTML 1.
The site is not necessarily compatible with browser-specific peculiarities that violate the HTML standard. Any complaints about problems related to that should be directed to the browser manufacturer, not to the webmaster of Musica Viva (or any other webmaster for that matter).

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What's wrong with this site?

You tell me!
Please e mail any error reports (big or small) and ideas how to improve Musica Viva to frnordbe@online.no

I know of a few things that're wrong, though:

The site is far too small. There should have been at least ten times as many titles!
Many people can't find it. Remember to tell all your friends about Musica Viva!
There is no pop, rock or other modern music here. Not much I can do about it, I'm afraid. It's all because of copyright.

How about copyrights?

That is two questions, really. First all my own arrangements, and the editions of the other music are copyrighted by me. You are allowed to print the music for your own use, but I give you no permission to distribute it further. Also, if you ever perform any music from Musica Viva in public, you'll have to remember to report it to whatever performing rights society your country have, just as you are supposed to do when you perform music you have bought in a store.
More info

As for other peoples' copyrights, I am try hard to avoid violating any. If I have accidentally violated anybody else's copyrights, please tell me, and I will correct it immediately!
Musica Viva is physically located in Norway and maintained by a Norwegian citizen living in Norway. This means that Norwegian copyright laws - and only Norwegian copyrigth laws - apply to the site. If you as a visitor download, print out or in any other way physically move some of the content to your own country, your copy of the music will automatically come under the copyright laws of that country. Usually this is no problem, but there might be ocassions where some of the content of Musica Viva is illegal in certain countries. As the webmaster of Musica Viva I take absolutely no responsibilities for that.

So how are those Norwegian copyright laws then? Compared to other countries, about average. Some countries have stricter laws, some have more lax laws. To sum up a 17 pages long law text: Music by identified composers who have been dead for 70 years or more is public domain in Norway. There is also an additional paragraph stating that music that is public domain in its land of origin also is public domain in Norway. The same time limits are valid for works by unidentified composer, but then it's a question of when the work was first published.

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How could you manage to do this work?

I've gotten a few questions about it, so I guess I'll have to answer
I get lots of response and suggestions from friends and visitors at Musica Viva, but basically the site is made and maintained by one single person.
Without bragging, I suppose most people would find it unlikely - or even impossible - that one person can manage this much. Here are a few explanations:

HTML editors
Modern HTML editors is one reason why I manage to get thing s done faster than many other webmasters. But perhaps not the way you think. Fact is I never ever waste my time using such fake "time saving" tools. That's right. First I decide how I want the page to look, then I write the code. Not always completely manually, of course. I use all the search-and-replace routines in all my text processing programs for all their worth. And I also use a few databases that automatically add the bulk of the code (that I made in the first place) to the pages.
OS
I only use Macintosh computers, and my computer is declared as a Microsoft free zone. I don't want to say too much about that here, but fact is that it would have been impossible to make anything like Musica Viva with a Windows computer. Even if you compensated for the inefficiency of Windows simply by spending twice as much time working, there would still be lots of extra errors and bad designing to account for. As for Linux - I suppose I could have made even better work with Linux, if I could just manage to avoid all the distractions. Linux is a marvelous OS, but it makes it far too easy to spend a day creating a subroutine that saves you one hour of work.
Backlog
I've always collected music and information about music. A lot of what I've been gathering was already stored on my computer when I founded Musica Viva. Converting everything to an Internet-friendly format was a lot of work, but not nearly as much as doing everything from scratch would have been.

What file formats are used for sheet music?

Almost all the music files at Musica Viva are in GIF format. This is the standard graphics format on the web, and it should be readable with any browser that supports graphics at all. The format is also very compact. The disadvantage is that the print quality can never be as good as PDF or EPS, but I have found the advantages to the format to be much more important.
A lot of the titles are also available in ABC format. Despite it's simplicity ABC is a very powerful tool for notating simple music like lead sheets.
I have some of the titles in high quality PDF format as well.

You'll find an overview of sheet music formats used by other sites at The Free Sheet Music Directory Help Page.

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Why are there banner ads?

Building and maintaining Musica Viva takes quite a lot of time and some money. I simply cannot manage to keep this project up to the standards both you and I require if I don't at least manage to cover my expenses. Since I have nothing to sell through this website myself, the only way to break even is to include advertisements. It's just like any newspaper or magazine, really. Only, the advertisers covers (hopefully - some day in the far future) everything so that you won't have to pay anything.

That being said, I still try to be very careful about what I allow on my pages. Please tell me if you happen to have unpleasant experiences with any of my sponsors!

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Why do you promote your competitors?

I don't have any competitors, only fellow webmasters with common interests.

It's true!

It's not as if any of us are making big money on this anyway. Nor can a single webmaster ever hope to manage to post more than a tiny fraction of all the great music available.

If I can't help you directly with what you're looking for, I'm just happy to show you where else to look! I honestly feel that Musica Viva is the best free sheet music site on the web, but although it is far above the average both when it comes to quantity and quality, this is mainly because you can find the way to all those other great sites from here!

But don't you loose a lot of visitors that way?

No!

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