In a little-trafficked corner of the Web, a pair of classical music enthusiasts has spent half a decade obsessively re-creating hundreds of obscure pieces by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Mark Zimmer, a tax attorney in Madison, Wis., and Dutch composer Willem Holsbergen are the creators of the Unheard Beethoven Web site, a sprawling digital archive of unfinished, unrecorded and often unpublished work by one of classical music's towering figures. With painstaking care, they're systematically turning Beethoven's most illegible scrawls into digital scores that can be downloaded and played by any computer, with the ultimate goal of bringing to life virtually every note the composer put to paper.
Their passion may be little different than that of the obsessive Beatles fan who haunts record store basements looking for even the most marginal bootleg recordings. But they're also more ambitious, hoping--as did the creators of last month's hugely successful British Broadcasting Corp. series on Beethoven--to rekindle interest in a cultural giant.
News source: C|Net News.com
