Klarinet Archive - Posting 000562.txt from 1997/03

From: Martin PERGLER <pergler@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Copyright on cadenzas?
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 11:34:03 -0500

Someone raised the question of to what extent performers "cadenzas"
(and presumably other interpretive decisions) are copyrighted, and
to what extent others can just retranscribe them and use them for
their own performances.

Mark Charette replied that he thinks they are copyrighted and cannot
be used without permission (and made the important point that the
copyright holder will usually no longer be the performer) and compared
it to this situation of a software developer, who keeps the "ideas"
of his work bu gives up the rights to the "expression".
[Sorry about all the paraphrasing, it's hard to quote from the digest.
Hope I haven't misread any ideas.]

I wonder. Is it this simple? The copyright marked on a recording
unquestionably applies to actual soundtrack. How much does it apply to the
musical ideas? Does it apply to ornamentation and cadenzas? To the
phrasing on Jonathan Cohler's CD? To the revolutionary fast tempo on John
Eliot Gardiner's recording of Bach's Magnificat? To the tricks and turns
of jazz clarinetists? I certainly don't know.

University a cappella groups are notorious for often violating copyright.
But in some cases, apparently, their take-offs and borrowings from
famous songs and artists are quite legal without asking for permission.
I once heard (not sure how reliably) that sometimes it depends on
whether they actually write the music down (not legal) or not (fine).

I don't mean this as picking on you, Mark, but intellectual property
law is quite complicated and it's easy to use the wrong analogies
to draw the wrong conclusions. Do you (or anybody else) know how the
split between "expression of ideas" and the ideas themselves is drawn
in classical music? (if this is indeed the crucial question, which
I don't know enough to say)

Martin

-------------------------------------------------------
Martin Pergler pergler@-----.edu
Grad student, Mathematics http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~pergler
Univ. of Chicago