Licensing & rights
The free scores are genuinely free.
No royalties. No per-performance fees. No sign-up to read or print. Here is exactly what you may do with a Free School Music work, in plain language.
What a free work grants you
For any work marked Free to perform, you may:
- read the full conductor score on this site;
- print the score and every part, or save them as a PDF, straight from your browser;
- make as many copies as you need for your ensemble — there is no copy limit;
- perform the work at your school, classroom, or school event.
Reading, rehearsing, and performing are free — no royalty, no per-performance fee, ever. Here is how the free scores stay free: when a show is ticketed, tickets are sold through the School Box Office network and we keep a small percentage of ticket sales. A free, un-ticketed concert costs nothing. And keep the credit — the composer and Free School Music — on your program (we keep it lenient and good-faith, but it is required). Please don’t resell the score or pass it off as your own.
Free vs. premium
The library is free. A work marked Premium is a separate, paid title with its own terms; its page tells you how to license it. A premium work is never required — the free works are complete, not samples, and there is never a fee to perform the free ones.
Performance rights, carefully
The right to read or print a score and the right to perform it in public are different rights, so we are explicit: a Free-to-perform work grants you both, for school and educational performances. For a work engraved or arranged from a public-domain composition, our edition is the work we license to you for free; the underlying composition is in the public domain. We do not host or sub-license anyone else’s copyrighted edition or arrangement.
What we publish
Everything here is either our own original or engraved edition, or an engraving of a composition that is verifiably in the public domain — checked on the exact source. A musical work has two copyright layers on different clocks: the composition and the sound recording. We host compositions only — we never host or depend on a recording. When a composition is public domain but wrapped in a modern copyrighted edition, we engrave our own edition from the public-domain score, so we are never dependent on anyone else’s edition. If we cannot verify that a composition is free to share, we do not publish it. Every work is credited to its source.
If you want to chip in
Free School Music stays free. If a score saved you time and you would like to support more of them, you can leave a tip — pay what you want, or nothing at all. It is a thank-you to the arrangers, not a fee, and there is never any obligation.
The fine print
These scores are provided for educational use. They are not medical or legal advice, and nothing here overrides your own school’s policies — always follow them. We do not claim any official certification, approval, or formal standards alignment.