IMSLP Forums

I am beginning a collection of scores for the ballet accompanist. When the addition seems appropriate, I will publish these scores on IMSLP.

Of corse, I will browse the forum for copyright questions as they arise, but ballet scores pose a number of peculiar and consistent problems, so I opened this thread to discuss them. If we stick for the moment with the Classical ballets of the 19th Century, here is a short list of problems that consistently arise, making it difficult to date the musical contents or their arrangements:

1. Musical substitutions are made without any reference. A score labeled only "le Corsaire - A. Adam" could conceivably have none of the original music : 100% substitutions.

2. Ballets are regularly restaged, and new versions incorporate different -or new- music.

3. Ballets were often never published (Or circulation was so small that no catalogued copies are known to survive in any library)

4. The versions that interest us are usually identifiably associated with a distinct -currently operating- Theater and its performance tradition.

5. Truly original materials (not copyist versions) that appear in the wild are almost certain to have been removed from a theater without its knowledge or consent.

6. Russia didn't sign the Berne convention, then completely overhauled its copyright laws... twice.


If you run these ideas around in the mind, I think you will find that -if several of the numbers are relevant for a particular document- determining with certainty the copyright status of the work could be virtually impossible. (For example, #1 and #2 together mean that when ballets are restaged, there is almost certainly no indication in the score what the new substitutions are, when they were added, who did the reductions, etc.)

Unfortunately, "multiple numbers apply" is the case for most ballet music outside a handful of very-well-known works.

My first question is about what to write in the notes to a score with a lot of unknown material. Do I say, "hey, if I'm violating a copyright here, let me know and I'll take it down", or is that somehow like saying that I'm expecting to run across a copyright violation? (I'm not.)

The Case In Question:
The first score I uploaded is a piano rehearsal score for a ballet that is historically unobtainable. A PD version appeared here 12 years ago. Reconstructing the contents is difficult, and I included a written Preface with an outline of the contents as I understand them, and the gaps in knowledge.
I have no reason to doubt that this score is in the Public Domain (all of the music, and all the individual reductions). In fact, for one uncommon work in this score -by sheer chance- I can verify that the arrangement almost certainly has to be over 100 years old. This is the most likely case for all parts of the score. Reductions made at the time the music was written, so the score could be rehearsed... .and then collated together over time as the score changed.

So what am I asking?
My concern is this: it is impossible to get information like this on every piece of music in this score, many of which I still have not identified. When writing written documentation for materials like this I'm conflicted. On the one hand
-- don't want to act like I never realized unearthing history could lead to unknown owners and copyright holders. Of course it can. On the other,
-- I don't want to give the impression that I am expecting my work to be in violation of copyright, which I certainly am not.

Are there some Best Practice guidelines here? Do I have to be thinking about these things when writing my preface? I've also sort of assumed that it's safe to publish things without knowing all this information, because otherwise nothing old could ever enter the public domain at all, by simple virtue of it being unknown. Obviously that's silly. But where does silliness end and personal responsibility begin here?

You'd need to give an actual example in order to judge this.

However, to respond to your points.

1. If so, this may need to be treated as an anonymous work (mis-)attributed to the putative author.

2. The restagings have no impact on the copyright of the music used.

3. If you have a copy of it, it almost certainly came to be published in the legal sense. Besides this, if the music was publicly performed, then a lack of publication does not affect its public domain status under Canadian law.

4. That a certain version may be associated with a theater has no relevance to copyright status.

5. Works have copyrights. Specific copies don't.

6. Russia is a member of the Berne Convention now and has been for decades.

Anyway, you have asked such vague and open-ended questions that there is no reasonable way to give you an answer. The copyright status of the music is determined based on the actual facts. See https://imslp.org/wiki/Public_domain for information.

Anything from the 19th century is extremely likely to be in the public domain worldwide. Whatever the case may be, you don't get to take scores down (or approve them to be put up) — we would be the ones who do that, based on whether or not a copyright claim is actually true. That's our job. Give us actual facts and then maybe we could comment on them...

Ok. Clearly it is time to use a specific example. "Le corsaire" by Adolphe Adam. https://imslp.org/wiki/Le_corsaire_(Adam,_Adolphe)
Under "arrangements and transcriptions" there is a Complete Score, 20th cen, n.d. I have made a readable version of this score and it is directly below.

The versions of this ballet that are performed today have virtually none of the original music. This is the correct place for this scores, but the actual music present is by different composers, inserted at different times, and I was unable to identify much of it. In this case, the names and dates of the composers is probably reconstructible from historical documents, once the music is identified, but none of this information is recorded in the score.

Thus #5 , the restagings affect the copyright considerations for a particular score of "Le corsaire" because every score is different. Here, I am virtually certain that I know what I'm looking at and every inserted piece (which are all obviously romantic -and not even late romantic- by style), is in fact from the 19th century. But that doesn't mean I can name them. The arranger is unknown. n.d. 20th century. In principle, there could still be a copyright on a particular arrangement; this is ballet music and a piano score is a reduction. [For other ballets the problem is going to arise that the insertion is more recent, and theoretically still under copyright].

There is one puzzling clue to the date. The score includes an old, extended version of a scene called "Le jardin animé" that was inserted in the 1880s but rarely used afterward. It is so uncommon that it was basically unknown until it was "unearthed" in 2007 by the then director of the Bolshoi, Yuri Burlaka. M. Burlaka is also a pianist and an expert in the history of ballets, and he makes written piano scores of the surviving original materials from ballets he researches.

So reasonably, there are two possible provenances of this score, which was uploaded to IMSLP in 2012.
a) it predates the Burlaka version (the music was first used in the 1880s) or
b) it is a copy of Burlaka's arrangement

If b) were true, the work would have a copyright claimant, since the arrangements of the original source materials would be his. Yes?


Also in response to your tone, do you believe that all this information was taken into account when you -the experts- approved this score as Public Domain in 2012? Forgive me, but it seems to me that either you were exceptionally circumspect and asked someone like Mr. Lopez to review the work, or -what seems much more likely- the work was approved without the slightest knowledge of its contents.

In this particular case, I have every reason to believe -wherever it comes form- the arrangements in this score are from the 19th century. I have -by sheer chance- seen a note-for-note duplicate of one of the numbers in this "lost" scene, in a score of the Ballets Russes collection at Oklahoma University (stuff from their tours in the U.S.). Thus, the scene came to America with Diaghilev. It's a 19th century arrangement of a 19th century piece of music.

I could not possibly verify something like this for every work in this score. I still don't know what half the music is.