The American Music Center to offer free contemporary classical music on the web:

the American Music Center, an organization to aid in the distribution of music and serve as an information clearinghouse. When the center opened an office on West 42nd Street later that year, it quickly became a command post and drop-in site. In 1990 the center moved to airy offices on West 26th Street. In the last few years the kind of networking the center was founded for has been shifting to its Web site, which includes an online magazine called New Music Box.

This afternoon the American Music Center takes a bold leap into the Internet future when it formally introduces New Music Jukebox (newmusicjukebox.org) in a briefing at Avery Fisher Hall. This free site promises to be a powerful Web portal for contemporary American music and the composers who create it, as well as performers, professionals in the larger field and the musically curious.

New Music Jukebox offers a 24-hour "virtual" listening room with streaming and downloadable sound files, as well as extensive composer biographies, works lists, publishers, performance data and other information, all cross-referenced. If things go well, browsing through New Music Jukebox may give today's online users some sense of what it was like to hang out at the center's bustling, ramshackle office some 60 years ago, to talk shop and trade scores with other people in the field.

But legal thickets could slow down the process. Besides using sound files from commercial recordings, which are protected by copyright, New Music Jukebox will also include scores online, either excerpted or complete, which users will be able to view and in many cases print out or download for free. To date, printed scores have been strictly protected; photocopying them is illegal. In order to include scores online, the American Music Center has been engaged in case-by-case negotiations with composers, publishers and record producers. Their success could represent a breakthrough in copyright law.

With the rising costs of printing and with fewer houses taking on fewer composers, the system of distributing and promoting new works has languished. Composers have increasingly turned to self-publishing. The Internet offers an alternative way to distribute scores, yet there are legal complications, as Richard Kessler, 43, the center's executive director since 1997, acknowledges.

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