I'm sure many of the great composers here have thought about this issue!

I'm interested to create new arrangements of existing hymns, especially set them for different instruments. The question I run into is what kinds of copyrights and royalties I might be running into in this situation. Because I'm not directly using the original as written, it was just the launching point.

I would imagine that this would be a "derivative work," but I don't know what's normal for music copyrights. Does anybody have any resources they could point me to?