Re: Copyright Free Music

[Phil Shapiro <pshapiro@CapAccess.org>]

In answer to Jim Aufderheide's question about copyright free music,
one good resource are the melodies from classical music and
traditional folk songs. (By "traditional," I mean folk songs that
are over a hundred years old.)

All of this music is now in the public domain. Keep in mind, though,
that although the music is in the public domain, the performance
of the music can be copyrighted. So if you'd like to use some Vivaldi
or Bach in your video or multimedia presentations, you need to
perform the music yourself (or find a public domain performance
of the music). Classical music sold on cassette or CD's are almost
always copyrighted performances.

To help create more public domain classical music, I spent an hour
or so this morning recording renditions of some well known classical
tunes using my classical guitar. I'm mostly self-taught, but the
ended up sounding quite nice.

Here is a list of the tunes I recorded. There's a total of about
eight minutes worth of music.

Vivaldi's Largo (from the Concerto for Lute and Mandolin)
Pachebel's Canon
Amazing Grace
Greensleeves
Jacob's Ladder (hymn)

I also recorded some improvised guitar fingerpicking that might
be useful for the opening or closing of a video or multimedia
presentation.

In the spirit of sharing, I'm donating these recordings to the
public domain. These recordings may be used for any purpose by
anyone.

Currently the recordings are living on a Mac formatted Iomega
Zip disk. Perhaps there are some folks out there who can help
transfer these recordings onto audio tape, and make copies of
such an audio tape available to anyone at cost.

If you'd like a copy of the files on the Zip disk, kindly
send a Mac formatted Zip disk and self-addressed mailer to
the address in my signature below.  I'll copy onto the same
Zip disk some of the other freeware and shareware educational
stacks and software I've designed.

Jim, I hope this helps answer your question about copyright
free music.

    Cheers,

      - Phil Shapiro

By the way, if you happen to know any accomplished piano players
out there, some of the most lively copyright free piano music
is the "honky tonk" style piano music from the 1890's.

(Incidentally, I'd gladly make this recorded music available
for downloading except for the fact that the digitized tunes
add up to a total of 16 megabytes.  If anyone cares to upload
this to an ftp site, they're quite welcome to do so.)


--
Phil Shapiro
5201 Chevy Chase Parkway, NW, Washington DC 20015-1747
http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/