Drupal enables Musescore - an open source project and a commercial company - to prosper with open source while leading a revolution in the centuries-old tradition of music notation. This special DrupalCon event will not only show how Drupal powers the products and services behind Open Source Bach, but will actually demonstrate the benefits with a special appearance of Kimiko Ishizaka, the Open Goldberg Variations pianist, to show on the piano the innovations that are being brought to the music world from open source.

[Tip - try Open Source Bach now, in the form of this free iPad app made by Musescore]

The central focus of the session will be three Drupal websites Musescore.org, Musescore.com, and Opengoldbergvariations.org, that together fulfil the mission of bringing musical scores to life online.

The technical features discussed will include:

How Drupal allows musical scores to be treated as content, allowing groupware collaboration, editing, annotation, playback, and embedding on 3rd party sites.
How Drupal facilitates a paid membership model with strong privacy controls to protect composers' copyrights and intellectual property while generating revenue for Musescore.com.
How the Musescore product is translated and internationalized using Drupal's translation server technology.
How modern electronic versions of scores enhances the music experience online and in live performance.

The philosophical topics will include:

The relationship between Musescore.org (the open source project) and Musescore.com (the commercial company)
Enabling sharing and collaboration for notated music, and the 21st-century business models that make it work
The importance of having modern electronic scores for all music, including the already public domain classics.

The session will culminate in a live demonstration of Open Source Bach being performed on a Steinway grand piano - 1.21 gigawatts of piano playing!