Sharing scores

• Feb 12, 2020 - 15:15

Adult beginner trying to learn piano, no teacher available. Best guess currently is early intermediate (4?). Interest (for playing purposes) is non-classical- jazz, show tunes, 40's- 80's pop.

Seems to be not much available in published scores between simple beginner tunes and arrangements that are too complex for me. My solution has been to use Musescore to adapt commercially purchased arrangements by somewhat simplifying them, but retaining some musicality. To date, I have done 35 or 40 pieces like this.

So, a question- if I post any of these arrangements, does that violate copyrights? Seems like others may like to see them.

Comments

• Feb 12, 2020 - 15:34

I'm assuming you are referring to musescore.com, so further discussion is better suited over there. But, for now I can tell you that in general, MuseScore does have license agreements with many publishers, so if yours is covered you are safe. And if not, your score will be marked private once the conflict is detected. So you really don't need to worry about violations, that's musescore.com's job to sort out.

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• Feb 12, 2020 - 15:34

It might.

Normally speaking, you'd need to have consent from the copyright holder of the original work to be able to publish an arrangement of that work. Publish here is used in its broad sense of "making publicly available".

That being said, it seems musescore.com has copyright license agreements with some publishers, meaning that sharing their scores or arrangements thereof on that platform is allowed. And part of the Pro subscription money required for someone to be able to download such a score flows back to those copyright holders.
I am entirely clueless about which copyright holders they have agreements with; you could try asking it over there, although at least in the past, they weren't willing to share that information.

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• Feb 12, 2020 - 15:48

I'm using the free version of Musescore. Not too familiar with ins and outs of site or forum. Latest effort is an update of my previous effort on The Entertainer by Scott Joplin. Seems to meet the criteria mentioned in my first post. What if anything should I do with it, other than practising it myself?

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• Feb 12, 2020 - 19:06

Did so because when I typed the reference into the data field, I couldn't proceed, the check box was ghosted whether or not I selected from the menu of "guesses" that was generated. I've never posted a score, so perhaps I'm missing something?

Would like to show the correct attribution...

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