The Musical Public Domain in 2025
Thursday, February 20, 2025
The Roaring Twenties have finally completely arrived! On 1 January 2025, works published in 1929 entered the public domain in the United States, making publications from the 1920s free to use, at least in the US.
In law, the phrase “public domain” refers to works without copyright, usually because copyright has expired. This means that people died long enough ago that copyright protection has expired for their works and there is no law prohibiting the use, reuse, publishing, or otherwise building upon their creative ideas. Since copyright varies by country, national laws dictate what has entered the public domain.
Throughout most of Europe and in other countries where copyright expires after the death of the author plus 70 years, the works of composers who died in 1954 are now in the public domain in those countries. Note that this refers to a composer’s music, and other elements of any given creative work that were contributed by other people, such as words that go to a dramatic work, may still be under copyright.
In the United States, anything published in 1929 or before is in the public domain there, regardless of date of death. This finally puts George Gershwin’s symphonic poem An American in Paris in the public domain there because it was published in 1929. Since Gershwin died in 1937, however, his works have been copyright-free in the EU and in some other places in the world for over 15 years.
Potential for confusion is certainly present when a digitized score is found on a website hosted in one country but the composer’s works are still under copyright elsewhere. It is important to be aware of and respect copyright laws, even in the digital environment.
Whether in the EU, the US, or elsewhere, the addition of the 2025 newcomers to the public domain means that libraries and archives have a new slate of composers whose works they can scan and add to their digital collections.
In 2025, we welcome 61 composers with sources in RISM to the public domain in the EU. If we find out about initiatives to digitize their works, we will of course link to the digital copies in the RISM records. The table can also be viewed and downloaded here.
Franco Alfano and Oscar Straus are among the composers on our list. Clemens Krauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler, better known as conductors, also have a small handful of compositions in our database. Our RISM users will find a good number of sources by Licinio Refice, George Jokl, and Walter Braunfels. This year there is only one woman: Berta Gotthard (1885-1954), a Viennese composer with a mix of 18 vocal, orchestral, and piano pieces in RISM.
Further resources:
- Duke University, Public Domain Day 2025
- Wikipedia, 2025 in public domain
- An illustrated overview from the Public Domain Review
- Navigating copyright in the US from Cornell University
Image: Oscar Straus, The Last Waltz. New York: The Tama Music Publishing Corp., 1921. Charles H. Templeton, Sr. sheet music collection. Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries (US-SVasp). Available online (public domain).
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