AirTurn, Inc.

Welcome to Friday's free score from AirTurn, makers of the hands free page turning pedal system for digital sheet music (http://airturn.com). This week's free score is the Mozart flute concerto No. 1 in G major. This version has been cropped for landscape viewing, making it comfortable to read on regular computer screens, so you don't need to waste ink and paper by printing it out. Bookmarks have been added for speedy navigation between movements.

You can find the download link for the Mozart Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major, K. 313 at http://airturn.com/musicreader-library/flute/

You will also need to download a free demo version of MusicReader for Mac and PC computers in order to read this sheet music file - http://airturn.com/musicreader/musicreader

We hope you enjoy Friday's free score from AirTurn. If you'd like to suggest or contribute a free sheet music score, please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

I've been using computers to replace my paper sheet music library now for almost 9 years at this point.  A portion of my existing paper library was digitized using a variety of scanners before coming up with the Opticbook 3600 Plus Book Scanner, which improved the quality of my scans considerably and made the process go much faster.  A major chunk of my digital library came from resources such as CD Sheet Music, which quickly provided large collections of entire genres, such as the entire oevre of Chopin's piano works, the major classical Violin Sonatas and Concerti, and the complete Lieder of Schubert, all for as little as $19.95 per disc.  Over the years, as more and more sheet music became available as downloadable online resources, I've been able to supplement the remainder of my library with both paid and free public domain scores.  You can visit our Resources page for a growing collection of online sheet music vendor and resource links.

In addition to the technological and informational benefits of having all your music in digital formats, there is also the important environmental benefit of working paper-free.  At the time of this writing, I've estimated that my current digital sheet music library is comprised of around 6,000 scores, taking up about 20 GB of space on my computer's hard drive.  My large library comes from the fact that I work as a professional collaborative pianist, specializing in accompaniments for all the orchestral instruments.  I was curious to see what that library represented in terms of the number of trees saved, so I tried applying some of the paper calculations provided by Conservatree.  Assuming that we are using the kraft chemical (freesheet) pulping process to produce copier-paper quality sheets from trees (as opposed to the "mechanical" or "groundwood" process normally used for newsprint and telephone directories, which is twice as efficient for the lower quality paper),

• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree
  1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

Given that my sheet music scores vary pretty wildly in size (anywhere from 4 to 70 pages, depending on the type of work ranging from short solos to major concerti), let's give a conservative rounding of 20 pages per score (given that sonatas are the vast majority of my scores).

• 6,000 scores would yield approximately 120,000 pages of music.
• At 8,333 sheets of copy paper per tree, 120,000 pages comes out to 14.4 trees.

That's the environmental savings just from trees.  What about the impact of printing ink, glues, high quality glossy covers, and even the years of pencils, erasers, and highlighters for marking up the music?  Now let's extend this illustration a bit further beyond a single user.  If a string quartet were to use computers as digital music readers, that could potentially mean a savings of 56 trees.  A 100-piece orchestra would equal 1,400 trees.  A small conservatory like The Curtis Institute of Music with a student population of 168 would equate to a forest savings of 2,352 trees.  A larger school like Juilliard, with 506 undergraduates (not counting their pre-college or graduate students), would represent 7,084 trees.

Even if the per-person library was only half, or even a tenth of my personal collection, you can see how quickly the use of paper sheet music scores becomes a major environmental factor.  So, for all you musicians and music leaners out there, take a second look at that laptop as not only a resource for browsing the web or keeping in touch with your friends, but also for storing and reading your sheet music scores digitally, and as a major tool to reduce your carbon footprint and save 14 trees :)

Here are some sites that seem to contain home-brewed transcriptions of popular Japanese Anime (cartoons) from movies, TV shows, and video games. A wonderful resource for younger students who need to be motivated!

One of the largest of these sites appears to be Ichigo's Sheet Music, which also features an active Forum and Chat community.

Another resource is Josh's Anime Sheet Music Collection - very basic in appearance and layout, but still worth checking out for the volume of arrangements available.

For serious students of Classical Guitar, you'll find one of the largest collections of Guitar sheet music scores at www.GuitarPress.com - the URL for their sheet music links page is at http://www.guitarpress.com/sheet.html

While it may not be the prettiest page from a web designer's point of view, it's still a useful resource to quickly (and cheaply) build up a significant digital library of classical guitar works.  There's actually a neat Theory page on the site that includes a chapter by chapter overview of the basics of Western Music History - short, easy to read chapters that read like Music History Cliff Notes extra light.