Last year I reported on the Juilliard School's grand unveiling of the much-talked-about manuscript of the four-hand arrangement of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, alongside dozens of other musicological treasures. Juilliard has now set up a handsome, high-tech website for its manuscript collection. You can roam through masterpieces of ancient and modern music, using zoom features to examine pages closely (for example, to see Leonard Bernstein's cartoons in the margins of his arrangement of Copland's El Salón México). It's hard to think of a comparable site where the working methods of so many great composers are made instantly accessible. This is a magnificent and generous use of digital technology.
