Visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum‘s website to download “The Concert,” a new classical music podcast offered under the Creative Commons Music Sharing license. The podcast features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists recorded from the museum’s Sunday Concert Series. “The Concert” includes music by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin for solo piano, orchestra, string quartet, and voice. A new podcast will be posted on the 1st and 15th of every month; users can subscribe to receive free, automatic updates delivered directly to their computers or mp3 players. With “The Concert,” the Gardner Museum becomes the first art museum to encourage sharing and free distribution of its online programming by using a Creative Commons license.

Charlotte Landrum, the museum’s podcast project manager, says:

The single greatest thing about this is that the podcast is providing a really great chance for the public to hear and share recordings that might never have been heard otherwise, that were literally sitting on a shelf in the museum. There are two benefits: first, you get to hear new voices in classical music, artists that might not be distributed as widely on recordings; second, you get to hear master musicians, the ones who are more widely-recorded already, playing things that they may never have released commercially. We’ve already seen these ideas at work with so-called “popular” music online, but this is something new for classical music lovers.

You can read more about this exciting news in our press release.