Ask State Assemblyman Garey Bies if he's still a dues-paying member of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Recently a couple of staffers for People for the American Way went undercover to a conference of the ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. Here's what they discovered: Creating a Right-Wing Nation, State by State by Joshua Holland.

It is the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money. ALEC is a public-policy mill that churns out "model legislation" for the states that are unfailingly pro-business. The organization fights against civil rights laws, as well as consumer, labor and environmental initiatives.

According to the National Resources Defense Council, corporations "funnel cash through ALEC to curry favor with state lawmakers through junkets and other largesse in the hopes of enacting special interest legislation -- all the while keeping safely outside the public eye."

Madison attorney Mark S. Zimmer and Willem (sometimes also known as xickx), a computer programmer and lifelong Beethoven-lover in the Netherlands met on the Internet. Together they have created UnheardBeethoven.org, a collection of over 600 previously unrecorded works on vinyl or CD.

Both of them had over the preceding years developed an obsessive desire to accumulate recordings of all of Beethoven's works. Through the miracle of the internet, they were able to compare notes and see where each had been missing various items. But still, there were a multitude of works which sounded intriguing but which were unavailable on record or CD. Indescribable was their shock and horror upon learning the sheer quantity of works that really did exist but were quite inaccessible such as the Hess-list (containing 335 unknown works). Their shared frustration over the many works which had not been recorded was vented at about the same time as reasonably good computer soundcards became readily available.

Suddenly, the fog lifted, and they saw that they didn't need to wait for others to record and release the many missing pieces; they could, through creation of MIDI files, make their own "recordings" of these unheard pieces. Now they could hear these pieces, and in the process learned that there is indeed a wealth of interesting material amongst the unheard Beethoven. Willem and Zimmer assiduously began ferreting out these many mysterious pieces, with the tireless support of Patricia Elliott-Stroh, curator of the Ira F. Brilliant Beethoven Center at San Jose State University, and set to work on turning these scores into MIDI files.

Search the works, download and enjoy them for free at UnheardBeethoven.org. They also have a great set of links to more on their favorite composer.

If you get hooked on classics... you may enjoy searching through more free music at ClassicalArchives.com.