Klarinet Archive - Posting 000127.txt from 2000/09

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] ClarFest CD's
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 06:27:46 -0400

At 06:12 PM 9/4/2000 -0700, William Wright wrote:
> In fact, now that I think about it, I once asked this question in
>the context of renting music for public performance. Legally (which is
>not the same as art or historical accuracy), how much latitude do you
>have before the composer is legally entitled to prosecute because you
>misrepresented his or her composition to the public? I'm thinking of
>changes more severe than just transposing to a different key or moving
>to a different octave because of the instrument(s) that are available.
> Suppose I rented "Cats" and then substituted 60 bars of
>improvisation without prior announcement to the audience?
>
I used to be heavily involved in community theater, usually onstage or
occasionally playing in the pit, and once as music director for "South
Pacific," and still frequently play in pit orchestras. Out here in the
hinterlands, when local school and community groups do musicals, major cuts
and other alterations are routinely made in spite of publishers' warnings
to the contrary. Frequently the cuts are in the dance music because nobody
in the cast can actually dance, nor is anyone capable of reasonable
choreography. Sometimes whole songs are cut in order to avoid their
butchery by fine actors but weak singers. Most often LATELY, cuts in dance
music are made to match the Original Cast CD, since that is what even a
reasonably competent choreographer may have used to design the dance before
the whole score was available and is unwilling or unable to add steps when
the pit can so much more easily cut the music to match the CD, and even
know ahead of time that the cuts will "work" (One presumes that such
cutting would be at least grudgingly approved by the publishers, since they
have already done it themselves!). Certainly it would not be in the
publishers' best interest to allow wholesale changes, interpolations of
songs from other sources, etc., but I have not heard of anyone being
prosecuted for minor revisions. Of course, maybe they just weren't CAUGHT.

Bill Hausmann bhausmann1@-----.com
451 Old Orchard Drive http://homepages.go.com/~zoot14/zoot14.html
Essexville, MI 48732 ICQ UIN 4862265

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is too loud.

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