My Score Exchange profile and at least one other place where I have combined score and audio online, (Prelude on “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen”), so I’m neither entirely ignorant of the differences nor entirely indifferent to them. If nothing else, it’s less painful to create a digital score than one with pen and paper.
Nonetheless, those old scores have primacy - if you are basing something on them for extension by the public, you had better add real value. I found the playing on the Goldberg project less than enthralling (and, yeah, I did look in on that one a while ago). De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose, but the truth is, if I were to do a “mix culture” arrangement of Bach (and I don’t lack appreciation for that either), I’d want to start from my own audio. (It would make for less work because the working materials would diverge less from how I hear things, hence the primacy of the freely available old score.).
What MuseScore is doing isn’t really anything new - Finale, Igor and Sibelius were doing the same thing years ago, albeit with proprietary formats. MuseScore, if anything, suffers a bit from the fact that it isn’t quite there yet for professional work, although I don’t doubt we’ll see improvement. (I do use it for simpler works.) None of these companies saw the idea take off the way they thought it would. Sibelius scores, for one, weren’t limited to the SibeliusMusic site; you could embed them pretty nearly anywhere, and read them back by loading a freely available browser plug-in (state of the art back then). It may be significant that SibMus’ successor site, Score Exchange, has started showing embedded PDFs, rather than embedded SIB files, as default.
Heck, I recall a Web-based programme that allowed for collaborating on scores - it hasn’t gone very far either. There isn’t going to be a silver bullet for music literacy that way. MuseScore may or may not have a better run than the big commercial programmes in this regard, but I don’t expect to see the leap in magnitude you’d need for native browser support for, say, MusicXML. The biggest growth, in both numbers and audience, I’ve seen so far is in score-based videos similar to my own example.
