# Bach Lovers, Rejoice



## Philip

Have you ever seen this manuscript in such detail? La Ciaccona in all its splendour:









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I recently found out about Bach Digital, where supposedly about 90% of the remaining J. S. Bach manuscripts are available free of charge in digital form. The format is Zoomify. Their concept is practical for viewing large maps and big images in general. At first i was impressed by the level of detail, but then i got a bit turned off by the slow loading times and the lack of an overall view.

So... i spent a few hours writing (what i thought was going to be) a simple script that would enable me to download these images. Taken from Zoomify's FAQ:

"_Can I save a Zoomify Image?

No. Zoomify images are protected in that they cannot be saved the way that JPEGs in a browser page can: right-click Save As. Screen captures are possible but will only capture the current view (along with the toolbar and navigator window). While Zoomify is not presented as an image security technology, it does offer the benefit of making acquisition of images from a site much more difficult._"

Basically, Zoomify splits high-res images into square tiles at various scales. The tiles are stored as 256x256 JPEGs and displayed by the Zoomify flash viewer. What makes the task of downloading these images "difficult", is that you have to actually find every single tile, in non-browsable directories, and let alone stitch them back together to form the full scale image.

To spare you the details, with the help of Wget and ImageMagick, saving these images is indeed possible, and the result is quite remarkable: ~6000x9000 pixels of full scale archive quality digital scans, running at around 55MB+ per page in PNG format.

The image above is only about 1.7% of the original in terms of surface area... and about 0.85% in terms is data. To put that in perspective, here is the "Ciaccona" in actual size:










Among the available manuscripts are: The Art of Fugue, Matthäus-Passion, WTC, Inventions & Sinfonias, Violin Sonatas & Partitas, Cello Sonatas & Partitas, and many others; as stated before, 90% of the remaining autographs and originals parts.

I think some of these would make a great and most particularly unique addition to the TCFI wiki.


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## HarpsichordConcerto

One thing I notice about JS Bach's manuscripts was that he had very beautiful music handwriting. His manuscripts looked very nice.


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## Dodecaplex

Fookin' 'ell!

Check this out!


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## GoneBaroque

Thank you Philip for this resource. The clarity of the images is difficult to believe.


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## TrazomGangflow

Great sources! Thanks a lot. Despite the clarity and Bach's good handwriting I still can barely read it.


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## Sid James

That must have been like a final draft. His handwriting wasn't always that clear. Musicologists have literally come to blows over arguing about what part of the stave a dot of a note is sitting on with Bach's less easily decipherable scores.

But yes, this is a great resource. Big libraries and archives all over the world are doing a lot of digitising and zoomifying of historical documents. This is great for many reasons, one of them is more access for the public for these documents which otherwise the original "hard copy" could only have been accessed by a few people like scholars...


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