Show Ideas


Music that was written prior to 1923 has, in most cases, entered the Public Domain. What does this mean for you, the band director looking for show ideas? It means that you can commission someone to arrange a marching band show for you that uses music from before 1923...without paying a dime in copyright fees. Typically, if the work is still under copyright law, you have to contact the copyright holder, secure permission to arrange (and in some rare cases, composers and publishers are not willing to give that permission), and pay a fee for the right to arrange. But that fee only pays for the right to arrange; if you should ever want to record your work, you would need a separate license fee. Not so with Public Domain music.

Some things that people consider to be in the Public Domain actually are not, for example, Orff's Carmina Burana and Bernstein's West Side Story are two works that are guarded stringently by the estates of their creators, and are most definitely NOT in the Public Domain. It is always a good idea to double check any music you wish to have arranged, because copyright infringements can be a very serious matter, with legal and financial repercussions. To that end, I have compiled a list of Public Domain music that would be suitable for a marching show. If you would like any of this music arranged for your marching band, don't hesitate to contact me. This list is by no means comprehensive, as there are literally hundreds of works that are in the Public Domain.

Public Domain Music



† Indicates that I own the score already, meaning that the process of arranging would be immediate. All other scores would have to be purchased, therefore taking a little longer to arrange.

In addition to this list, keep in mind that ALL the works of the following composers are in the Public Domain at this point:


Be careful: just because a work may be in the Public Domain does NOT mean you can arrange any published version of it. There may be newer editions, revisions, and other situations in which a certain version of a Public Domain work is indeed under copyright. In order to be safe, an arranger MUST work from a copy that is old enough to fall into Public Domain. For example, if I wanted to arrange Stravinsky's The Firebird, I would need to work from his original music (1909) or his first two suites (1909 and 1911) but NOT his "final" interpretation of the suite, written in 1945.

*Please note that Nikk Nakks Music will only arrange copyrighted music if the copyright holder has given permission to do so. There are two ways in which this can be accomplished:


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