Chiff and Fipple Forums

Hi, I’m curious to know if there’s a website or a master list of tunes that fall into the open domain area vs. those that don’t. I know plenty of sessions have surely picked up a tune here and there that might not be too old, especially stuff written for a specific album.
I do realize that there’s also a bit of gray area where certain settings of tunes might be copyrighted, while older settings wouldn’t be.
Reason I ask is for a possible album project that I don’t want to say too much about yet (I will say it’s not an ITM album, but would definitely sample some tune melodies), but could very well never see the light of day anyway. I’m not 100% confident in my musical ability to pull it off. Regardless, when I get to arranging it all I’d still like to make sure I’m not accidentally using a Liz Carroll tune, for example, without realizing it.

No 'master lists' or anything like that, there are just too many tunes and there's a constant influx of new material

The Traditional Tune archive, formerly The Fiddler's Companion and The Irish Traditional Tune Index may go some way though. Or at least point to previous publication/recording.

Music rights organisations tend to keep databases with copyright specific information, some are accessible through the web.

The two-volume set of books "Sources of Irish Traditional Music c. 1600-1855: An Annotated Catalogue of Prints and Manuscripts, 1583-1855" will give you the provenance and earliest published dates of many old tunes, but the cost of these has been going up, unfortunately.

Excellent, thanks! I will look into these.

We were playing in a session a week or two ago and the venue had someone from the PRS visit. She listened for a while and then asked us to list as many of tunes we'd been playing as possible so she could check out the copyright status of them. Not quite sure what she thought of all the weird and wonderful names like Spootiskerry, Gander in the Pratie Hole, Geese in the bog, Muckin o Geordies Byre etc etc.
I have to confess it did spur us on to play tunes with the most obscure names we could think of, just so we could spell them out to her - bless!!

Do keep us posted with the project too...sounds intriguing!