[gnulinux]

Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music, and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy) to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass, Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house, good fucking luck. They literally won't make the publication available to you if they decide. Some works are only available for performance (i.e. if you're allowed to play this music, they "rent" the sheet to you) and no option to study the written work for other authors. It's excruciatingly difficult and holds the entire field back multiple, multiple decades. People write about ideas that were already explored and in circulation almost 4 decades ago because it's likely impossible to read their works.

Let me not even begin to talk to you about finding papers (analyses of other artists' works, musicology etc) if you're not affiliated with a university. You need a fortune to keep up with the field, or be arrrg (and it's not easy to find musicology papers in SciHub compared to other fields).

In this aspect we're significantly worse than how things were back in 1800s, 1900s or early 2000s.

[OfSanguineFire]

> god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house

One of the most striking developments in the last 20 years is that so many of those European publishers are making a lot of their study scores free to read online. Apparently they have given up trying to make money from ordinary music lovers and are OK with selling just to performers and libraries. Back when I became a huge fan of a somewhat lesser-known European avant-garde composer, I despaired that it would cost many, many thousands of euro to buy the study scores of all his pieces. Now they are right there for free on the publisher’s website.

Otherwise, piracy largely fills the gap, although many composers have some famous piece, the score of which is impossible to ever see. Boulez’s Répons and …explosante-fixe… are my usual examples of this – all the rest of his scores have circulated in pirate circles for well over a decade. Someting like Magnus Lindberg’s KRAFT is probably not easily found because its score is a meter tall and therefore difficult to scan.

[gnulinux]

Hmm I'll be honest, I always have very difficult time finding both of the options you listed. Not aware of any publishing house that share contemporary sheet music for free, nor do I have a good source for sheet music piracy. For piracy, I try the standard sources such as Library Genesis, Pirate Bay, Google "X PDF" etc... and almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.

[OfSanguineFire]

Universal Edition, Edition Wilhelm Hansen (now part of Wise Music Classical, I think) and Boosey & Hawkes are examples of publishers who have put up a lot of scores by 20th century composers for free. The Finnish Music Information Centre website has many scores by Finnish composers of recent decades.

With regard to pirated scores, that mainly happened on filesharing networks like Soulseek and DC++.

> almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.

Why don’t you just write to them and ask for a PDF? As you know, composers are usually happy to hear of any interest in their music, and (just like academics and their research papers) they don’t always agree with their scores being “behind a paywall” for personal use.