Abstract

This case study will describe the processes and challenges of publishing the English Heritage Music Series (EHMS). University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing was approached in early 2020 by researchers with a proposal to take content archived in the Novello Collection of the Royal College of Music in London and create engraved scores for compositions that are out of print and in the public domain. The lack of access and printed engravings meant that a considerable number of these compositions had not been performed in over one hundred years. The U of MN Libraries Publishing Team was challenged to create an appealing digital website that could be continually updated by the researchers, provide copyright expertise on publishing public domain content mixed with openly licensed content, and create a metadata schema appropriate to music publishing and cataloging. The goal of the English Heritage Music Series project is to create reuse, primarily in the form of live performance. EHMS has had impact in both seeding reuse and benefitting from reuse: The Royal College of Music Library notified us that they are systematically adding print copies of the EHMS engravings to their collection, and the Hertfordshire Chorus provided recordings of their performance of our score of Parry’s De Profundis for sharing on the EHMS website.

Keywords

public domain publishing; music scores publishing; archival materials publishing; open access publishing; open licensing

Project Takeaways

• Learn more about assessing content from archives and using accurate copyright labeling and licensing to promote reuse. 

• Discover how publishing music scores differs from other forms of digital publications and projects and what types of libraries-based expertise were required for a successful project.

• Learn how project scope and size is critical when working with public domain materials.

Project Link

https://ehms.lib.umn.edu/ 

Project Background

University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing

The University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing imprint was established in 2014 to support the University’s mission of "promoting access to higher education and collaborating to advance knowledge benefiting communities, the state, and world." Publishing Services supports UMN affiliates' and scholarly societies' creation of scholarly publications. The imprint publishes journals, books, dynamic scholarly serials, and textbooks.

Since 2014, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing has launched 25 journals and published 19 monographs and 18 textbooks. The Publishing Team is currently made up of a Publishing Services Librarian, a Publishing Services Coordinator, the Director of Affordable Learning and Open Education, the Open Education and Affordable Content Librarian, and a Web Developer. The Publishing Team currently supports publications on Open Journal Systems (OJS), WordPress, Pressbooks, and Manifold.

English Heritage Music Series

In early 2020, the Publishing Team was approached by University Professor Matthew Mehaffey and researcher Dave Fielding with a proposal to take content archived in the Novello Collection of the Royal College of Music in London and create engraved scores for compositions that are out of print and in the public domain. Dave Fielding had an established relationship with the Royal College of Music, and his special research focus is late 19^th century and early 20^th century English choral works by historically significant composers. This era of music in England is unique because there was wide investment in commissioning choral works for performance. However, only some works became more widely successful and have remained in print. Because of a lack of access, a significant number of works from this era had not been performed in over one hundred years. The primary goal for Mehaffey and Fielding in establishing the English Heritage Music Series (EHMS) was to create reuse for archival content, primarily in the form of live performance.

The Publishing Team was challenged to create an appealing digital website that would highlight the value and uniqueness of this era and style of music while also maximizing discoverability. The site would be continually updated by Fielding, while the Publishing Team would (1) provide copyright expertise on publishing public domain content mixed with openly licensed content and (2) create a metadata schema appropriate to music publishing and cataloging. These challenges were new to us because this was our first publication devoted to publishing music scores.

Nancy Sims, UMN Libraries Copyright Program Librarian, helped clarify that works that are public domain in the United States were (as of 2022) published before 1927, or are works that were unpublished by composers who passed away more than 70 years ago. If a work was assessed to be in the public domain, Fielding could take raw manuscripts and create engravings, which are the official scores and parts for a composition. Engraving provides conductors and musicians with highly legible versions of scores that are easy to read and accessible to perform for modern musicians. In some cases, works from this era exist only in the Royal College of Music archive, and some are still in handwritten forms. Dave Fielding agreed to make his contributions openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, and we have used a standardized rights statement of No Copyright – United States to inform users of the public domain status of the compositions. Limiting this publication to public domain works and using machine readable labels means that reuse permissions for performance are unnecessary, and distributors can share the works within the terms of the Creative Commons license.

Jessica Abbazio, UMN Music Librarian, walked the Publishing Team through the standard structure and layout of music scores. The Publishing Team decided at the beginning of the project to build a WordPress site for this publication. The WordPress editing interface allows Fielding to create new entries for composers and publications as he is ready to upload new engravings. Within WordPress, our developer could build custom layers of pages unique to the type of content we were publishing. Pages within the EHMS website are sorted by composer, then nested by work, and then by parts. WordPress also allowed us to create the custom metadata fields unique to music cataloging.

Kristi Bergland, Music Metadata Librarian, assisted in the creation of composition-level schema to accurately identify editions of the works. The metadata needed for scores includes composer, librettist, year of composition, premiere performance, voices and instrumentation, information about the autograph manuscript, and the year it was published via EHMS. We created unique catalog numbers for the scores that Dave Fielding is engraving. The unique catalog numbers assigned to each score allow them to be identified as unique items within the English Heritage Music Series. For example, in Figure 1, Parry was the first composer in our series, De Profundis was his fifth work added to the series, and there are three scores attached: the main score, the vocal parts score, and the instruments parts score. Therefore, the catalog number is 1 for Parry, 1.5 for Parry’s fifth work and 1.5/01 for the main score, etc. The individual instrument parts are engraved to adjust for the pitch of each instrument, and they are ordered according to the recommendations in the Dartmouth Score Order document (Dartmouth College, 2006). The final step for EHMS metadata was to request an ISSN, as the English Heritage Music Series meets the Library of Congress’ definition of an electronic serial.

Reuse and Sharing

Our partners on this publication had a goal to spark interest and performance by making these compositions readily available for reuse. To further this goal, we included a performances page on the EHMS site calling for sharing notifications and recordings of new performances of the works contained within EHMS. We continue to receive notifications that the works are being performed, but it is not always practical or desirable for performers to share recordings of their performances. One exception is the Hertfordshire chorus performance of C. Hubert H. Parry’s De Profundis. The Hertfordshire Chorus granted permission to share their recordings on the EHMS page devoted to De Profundis.

Dave Fielding began his work by accessing manuscripts in the Royal College of Music Library Novello Collection. As part of his work, Fielding also shared PDF copies of the EHMS engravings back to the Royal College of Music Library, and they have notified us they are adding printed copies of the English Heritage Music Series to their shelves alongside the original manuscripts. News of the existence of the EHMS scores was shared in the form of a piece for the July 2021 issue of The American Organist titled “Choral Old and New” and authored by Philip Brunelle. The EHMS scores are also being shared via the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) / Petrucci Music Library.

What’s Next

The English Heritage Music Series has grown beyond the size described in the original proposal that suggested publication of perhaps dozens of works by a small number of composers. Dave Fielding has now added hundreds of works by dozens of composers. The primary goal of promoting sharing and performance in the music community has been met. However, as this era of music stretches into the early 20^th century, Fielding continues to discover critical works by important composers that are out of print, but not in the public domain in the United States. As a library publisher with an open access mission, we had not planned this project to address in-copyright works. Expanding the scope would require an expert in both US and UK copyright law, an expert in the legal and genealogy research required to find current copyright holders, and requests for the layers of permission needed to publish open access and allow performance reuse. This is beyond the resources available to our Publishing Team at this point. Another option would be to defer responsibility to users to secure performance rights. We believe it could reduce the value of EHMS as a collection if users were uncertain if they could secure the rights to perform any of the pieces. Because there are a limited number of composers of English choral music from this era, updates to the site may become fewer and less dramatic, but EMHS as an archival source and performance resource will remain a valued contribution to the choral performance community.

References

Brunelle, P. (2021). Choral Old and New. The American Organist, 55(7), 32–33

Dartmouth College. (2006). Dartmouth Orchestral Score Order. https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/catmet/cataloging/score_order.pdf

International Music Score Library Project, or, Petrucci Music Library. (2006). https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

Library of Congress. (n.d.) ISSN for Electronic Serials. Retrieved on November 17, 2023, from https://www.loc.gov/issn/basics/basics-brochure-eserials.html