Can I rewrite scores?

[Rachmaninoff]

I use to rewrite scanned scores for personal studying purposes, so that I can really "hear" them and also pay attention to each note and articulation detail. I actually use Sibelius to do this.

Once the score is finished, I can export it to PDF, the whole score and all the parts. The result is a score with an outstanding quality for printing, much better than any scanned score, as you can see on this example.

It's a lot of work, and I would be glad to share it with other musicians.

My question is: should I upload such scores, even when they already exist? Any copyright question?

[horndude77]

If you did the re-typesetting work then the copyright is yours. IMSLP prefers a creative commons license for things like this if you do submit.

If you have a score (like the beethoven sample) already done I think it would be useful. Another benefit would be to extract the individual parts which don't exist yet in IMSLP. Though it does take a lot of work to make a good quality score.

Also I'd prefer pdf creation to be repeatable so errors can be corrected and the score improved. I think you'd just have to upload the sibelius file also. At least those with sibelius could re-create it.

[imslp]

Uploading those scores are perfectly fine, as long as you don't overwrite the original ones (i.e. just choose a different file name)

[pml]

Bear in mind, although the quality of PDFs exported from Sibelius is usually exemplary, the score itself will still require proof-reading! This is why it is always handy to have a scanned-in score at hand, assuming that it actually was put in front of an editor for correction of proofs, before it went to print. (Judging by some scores in my collection, some publishers simply printed works as the engraver left them, without any attempt at proofing them against what the composer had actually written.)

Regards, Philip