Webcast Launch: The Concert from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Many a Sunday finds Bostonist somewhat hung-over, looking at a greasy plate of bacon, eggs, and some sort of potato product. By the time brunch has finished we've already missed a great classical music concert at the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum. We feel rewarded when we do end up making it to the ISGM for the Sunday afternoon show. The ISGM offers a whole lot of what those smart folks call "fine art." Today, in a totally hip move, the museum launched a new webcast, The Concert that will let us catch all the classical goodness they offer up on Sundays under a deliciously unrestrictive Creative Commons license letting the sounds be heard and shared. The Concert won't be a replacement for a Sunday afternoon at the ISGM (it really is beautiful if you've never been), but it will allow us to catch up on those we miss, and give us a little culture to drop during a dinner party or an afternoon sitting around blogging.

They tell us they've got the longest running museum music series in the country, and freshly back from summer vacation it already made our radar in the new season. This week we picked the Bach Cello Suites performed by Colin Carr as part of our weekly music agenda. The ISGM will undoubtedly add this to The Concert and it will also find its way into the Music Library as individual tracks. They've extended the Creative Commons license to those works as well. This is and unprecedented step for a museum to offer such a large collection under a some rights reserved arrangement. They've gotten some help from the folks at Harvard's Berkman Center to make sure the legal bases are covered – and are using a Creative Commons license to make sure the legalities are clear.

This post was created with the audio aid of the Borromeo String Quartet, performing Schubert: String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”), D.810 we gobbled up from the ISGM's Music Library. Highly recommended.