On Mar 15, 2006, at 9:41 AM, Phil Daley wrote:
1. I take a Bach chorale and arrange it for a bell choir.
The Bach chorale is public domain, so you have complete freedom to do whatever you want with it.
Partial exception: if you happen to be working from someone else's copyrighted edition of that Bach chorale, you have to be careful that what you're arranging is actually the original work and you aren't accidentally stealing some of the editor's artistic value added. That's not likely to ever be a problem with Bach, but it could be for an obscure composer where you know the original is PD but you don't really know how much has been reconstructed by the editor.
2. I take an SATB choral piece and arrange it for TTBB.
If the choral piece is public domain, then same as #1. If the choral piece is copyrighted, then basically you have no rights to do anything with it without permission.
Partial exception: Although you aren't allowed to arrange the piece, assuming you do have the right to perform it you are not required to perform it not exactly as written. So, for example, you might roadmap out who will sing what as you perform the SATB piece with four men. As long as you're doing that, you might write out your plan for who sings what in this SATB piece, in which case your notes might look suspiciously like a TTBB arrangement, even though it really isn't. Basically the idea is to determine how far you can go down this path while still maintaining the legally fiction that you aren't really "arranging" it at all but you're just singing the original and taking premeditated liberties with it. Obviously, this is a fuzzy area, but I think there's room for quite a bit of fudging here.
But if you're going to try that, you'd better not shatter your legal fiction by doing something like releasing your version to the general public or signing your name on it as "arranger".
mdl whose legal advice is worth as much as David Bailey's _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
