Finding Digital Scans of Sheet Music?

Crymson asks: "I've been trying to find a repository of sheet music out on the web. I'm mostly interested in Classical, although scores for Brass pieces would be nice. I'm sure with Google digitizing all the books of the world, someone must be digitizing all of the sheet music. I don't want special viewers, and I don't want to pay out the nose for music that *may* be what I'm looking for. Where is a decent repository of free sheet music?"

Re:Copyright is copyright

[westlake]

Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is. Yes, that's right, the actual way the printing company formats the score and arranges it on the page is copyrightable. So what are you going to do, track down an ancient piece of parchment and scan that? No. The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score, preferably from memory, then put it under a permissive license. Just be sure to note that you're not claiming copyright over the public domain work.

You are assuming that there have been no changes in musical notation since Bach and that there are no other significant problems in preparing a score suitable for modern performance.

If you are listening to a performance of Bach, it is almost certainly an orchestra's unique (and copyrighted?) interpretation of the work, and not an attempt at a mechanical, note-by-note, transcription of the score in manuscript.

Re:Copyright is copyright

[Frodrick]

it's not like you can go grab a recently printed score of Bach, scan it and put it on the web. Although Bach's work may not be covered by copyright, the particular printing you're copying probably is.

I have a fairly major credibility issue with that statement. Could you cite some sources for your assertion? - (Not including music publishers, of course)

My understanding of copyright law is that it requires a certain amount of creativity before something is considered copyrightable. Rewriting and reformating just isn't enough. I would normally expect that public domain music would only be freshly copyrightable IF enough new work had been added to justify adding the new publisher's name to the "Composed by" line.

There are a number of content middlemen (Music, video, sheet music) out there who are under the impression that every time they reissue the same work, copyright begins anew. They are wrong.

Everyonce in a while, a publisher will attempt to render public domain material copyrightable by introducing a deliberate error. Then they claim that copiers have infringed their copyrights on the errors. When challenged, this, too, fails the necessary "creativity" test for copyrightability.

"not score program, they probably copyright the output of it"

Not possible. While the program remains copyright, of course, the copyright of the output belongs solely to the author. I have used some of these programs; they allow you to set your own copyright notices.

Maybe we could host some?

[Ankh]

I experimentally put a couple of pages of sheet music on fromoldbooks.org [fromoldbooks.org] yesterday. I'm not sure how useful they are, but I'm contemplating adding a lot more out-of-copyright sheet music.

I'd be willing to host good quality scans from other people, too, but it has to be demonstrably out of copyright -- I'm not interested in "legal loopholes" here. I'd suggest using 1200dpi greyscale and then adjusting "curves" to make a clear, sharp image. Both the music and the typeset score must be out of copyright, as well as the lyrics. In the US and Canada this is generally easy to determine, but for music produced in other countries it can be arbitrarily difficult; anything printed before 1820 or so is pretty safe though.

This doesn't really help the original poster very much unless I happen to have some specific piece of music, of course!