Public Domain & License

Every musical composition catalogued on ClassicNotes is in the public domain. That is the entire point of the project: to give pianists, teachers, students, and listeners a single clean place to find legally free music for the keyboard.

What "public domain" actually means

A work enters the public domain when its copyright term expires. In most countries that follow the Berne Convention this happens seventy years after the death of the composer. Bach died in 1750 — his work has been in the public domain for centuries. Debussy died in 1918 and his compositions entered the public domain in 1989. Once a work is public domain, no one owns it: no estate can collect royalties on it, no publisher can stop you from printing it, and no licensing service can charge you for using it.

This applies to the composition — the notes, rhythms, and structure as the composer wrote them. It does not automatically apply to every printed edition of those notes. A modern, scholarly urtext edition with new fingerings, editorial markings, and a new engraving is itself a creative work and may be under copyright. The PDFs we link to are either themselves in the public domain or distributed under terms that permit free re-distribution.

What you may do with these scores

You may download, print, photocopy, redistribute, perform in public, record, broadcast, teach from, transcribe, arrange, and re-publish any of the scores in this catalog without asking permission and without paying a fee. You may charge for printed copies you sell, sell recordings of your performances, and use the music in films, games, or commercial productions.

What we ask (but do not require)

If you reproduce or perform a piece publicly, please credit the composer. If you reproduce a specific engraving from IMSLP or another source, please credit the editor and the source archive. None of this is legally required, but it is the small kindness that keeps open-access music ecosystems healthy.

Edge cases worth knowing about

Recordings are separate. A specific recorded performance of a public-domain work is itself a copyrighted sound recording. You can play the score yourself; you cannot freely redistribute someone else's recording of it.

Country differences. Copyright terms vary by jurisdiction. Almost every work in our catalog is public domain in the United States, the European Union, Canada, and Australia. If you are operating in a country with longer terms (such as Mexico's 100-year rule), check your local law before commercial use.

Modern editions. If a publisher has issued a new edition of a public-domain work in, say, 2010, that specific printed engraving may be under copyright. The composition is still free, but the layout and editorial markings of that edition are not. We link to public-domain or freely-licensed editions wherever possible.

The site itself

The ClassicNotes catalog metadata — descriptions, difficulty ratings, organizational structure, and the writing on this site — is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0) license. You may reuse our descriptions and metadata with attribution to ClassicNotes.