Initiatives
The tools are free to use. The initiatives are what the school stands for: long-term projects that make music more free — tracked here in the open, one at a time.
Initiative #1
The Public Domain, Preserved
A staggering amount of music already belongs to everyone. Every composition published before 1931 is public domain in the United States, and every recording published before 1926 — and each New Year's Day, another year of both walks free. But "belongs to everyone" and "everyone can actually have it" are very different things. Much of this music sits scattered across archives that stream but won't let you keep, crowd uploads with unreliable labels, and aging physical media — including recordings whose only robust copies are tapes in national archives.
So we want to gather it: everything in the public domain that is genuinely free and clear — verified, documented, and sorted into two lists.
List one: sheet music, free to keep
Scores that anyone may download, print, share, rehost, arrange, and teach from — no permission, no fees, no fine print. Not "free to view": free to use and redistribute.
What qualifies
- Period engravings of public-domain works — the actual printings published before 1931. US law grants no new copyright for merely re-typesetting a public-domain piece, but modern editorial editions (urtext, fingerings, realizations, critical commentary) can carry their own — so the list will take the original plates, not modern reprints of them.
- Arrangements judged on their own dates. An arrangement is its own work: an 1890 transcription of Beethoven is free; a 1970 choral arrangement of a folk song is not.
- Foreign caution: works first published abroad in 1931 or later can be US-copyrighted even when they're public domain at home, so they stay off the list unless proven clear.
- Freely-licensed modern engravings — beautifully typeset, machine-readable scores whose creators dedicated them to the commons (public domain / CC0, or attribution-only licenses we can honor).
Where we plan to start:
- IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library — the largest score archive on Earth; we'll take only files tagged public-domain in the US.
- OpenScore — expert transcriptions of classic repertoire, dedicated CC0. No strings at all.
- The Mutopia Project — re-engraved classical scores with the license stamped inside every file.
- CPDL / ChoralWiki — tens of thousands of choral editions published to be shared.
- Library of Congress notated-music collections — historic American sheet music scanned with "no known restrictions."
- Crowd-tagged "public domain" collections (MuseScore-derived datasets, Internet Archive uploads) — used for discovery only, then verified piece by piece; those labels are wrong too often to trust blindly.
List two: recordings, free to transcribe
Recordings in the public domain that are free and clear to keep, share, and — the part we care most about — transcribe into notation. A century-old performance preserved only as decaying shellac, or as digitized tape in a national archive, survives one disaster at a time. The same performance transcribed into open, editable notation is culture in a format that can be copied everywhere, corrected forever, and played by anyone. That's preservation you can put on a music stand.
What qualifies
- The recording: first published before 1926. Every January 1 through 2047 unlocks another year of recordings from a century before.
- The song itself: every record holds two copyrights — the recording and the underlying composition — and transcription is governed by the composition. Both layers must be public domain before a transcription goes on the list.
- The transfer: we'll build on raw, faithful transfers from the original discs and cylinders (which US courts have held earn no new copyright), or transfers explicitly dedicated to the public — never modern label remasters.
- Nothing still in-term, period. Recordings published 1926 and later are still under federal term, and rightsholders have shown they will pursue even nonprofit archives over them. We don't go near the line; we let each New Year's Day move it to us.
Where we plan to start:
- Library of Congress Citizen DJ and the National Jukebox — federally curated early recordings, the public-domain sets explicitly free for any use.
- Internet Archive 78rpm collections — hundreds of thousands of raw disc transfers; we'll filter hard to publications before 1926.
- UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive — 10,000+ wax cylinders, nearly all public-domain recordings, ideal transcription sources.
- Musopen — modern recordings of classical works released public-domain/CC0 on purpose.
- UCSB's Discography of American Historical Recordings — the reference we'll use to verify every publication date before anything goes on a list.
The ground rules
"Won't get anyone sued" will be a feature of these lists, and it will come from discipline, not luck:
- Date-gate everything. Compositions before 1931, recordings before 1926, arrangements and editions dated on their own — and the gates advance every January 1, so the lists will only ever grow.
- Verify, don't trust labels. A "public domain" tag on a crowd upload, a publisher's copyright line on a re-engraving, an archive's claim over a raw transfer — each will be checked against what the law actually says.
- Document provenance. Every entry will record where it came from, when it was published, and why it's free — so anyone can audit the claim, and so the proof travels with the music.
- When in doubt, leave it out. The public domain is vast; nothing borderline is worth the risk to the mission.
This page describes how the school will select material under US law; it isn't legal advice for your own use of these sources. Once the lists are published, write to swaco.llc@gmail.com about any entry you believe is mislabeled and we'll re-verify it.
Initiative #2
m3c: Open Source Music
A recording is a binary. Nobody ever shipped the source. Open source software publishes the form a programmer would edit; music has never published the form a musician would edit — the session, the stems, the takes. m3c is the argument for changing that.