Klarinet Archive - Posting 000084.txt from 2002/10

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] OCR software for scanning music
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 13:06:46 -0400

I wrote,
>Yesterday afternoon, when I decided I might as well
>try my own suggestion about transcribing Couperin's
>"Les Baricades Misterieuses" for four clarinets as an
>opportunity to learn more about working in Sibelius,
>I was unable to make a usable (in the sense of practical)
>scan with PhotoScore Lite.

Someone wrote to me privately this morning to ask whether I planned to try to
market my transcription. No. I'm a neophyte at music processing and worked
on the Couperin yesterday purely as a learning experience. (I don't have
time to finish the job right now, anyway.) Marketing such a transcription
could get me into legal trouble, because as I mentioned on a different thread
yesterday, I was working from a modern, Dover edition.

Because F. Couperin died in 1733, all of his music is in the public domain.
However, in order to claim the copyright on my transcription and distribute
it legally, I would have to work from the best score available that's *also*
old enough to be in the public domain. That's the only way to make sure that
my arrangement wouldn't infringe on the copyright of the current Dover
Publications edition. Next time I'm in the Library of Congress, I'll take a
look in the Performing Arts Library and see if they've got a copy of the
edition by Johannnes Brahms and Friedrich Chrysander, c. 1888. That's the
edition used to prepare the Dover edition, but for all I know, a Dover editor
may have tinkered.

Also, before I completed any transcription, I'd want to look at other
editions, including a facsimile of the manuscript if possible, as well as the
first edition, to determine exactly what editing took place over the years.
"Couperin le Grand," who was self-published, fussed over his page proofs so
meticulously that he drove his printers wild, but stuff happens.
Chrysander's 1888 preface stipulates, "...it was necessary to improve the old
edition throughout...." They did more than simply correct anything they read
as an error. For instance, to make the scores more legible to the
then-modern (Victorian) musician, Chrysander and Brahms reduced Couperin's
five clefs to two.

My edition would be still less faithful to Couperin, of course, since (among
other things), in the process of transcribing for modern clarinet players, I
would take the greater liberty of reducing the clefs to only one, by moving
all of the voices into treble clef. Probably I would also write out the
ornaments, rather than expect a modern clarinetist to study Couperin's
oddball system for just one short piece. (A modern keyboard player does
learn Couperin's system, but the reward is to play from 27 books of the
splendid short harpsichord pieces alone, not to mention the longer works.)
But regardless of the unfaithful intent, I think that anyone who transcribes
at all needs to do the homework first and base the edition on something other
than guesswork and presumption. I haven't done the homework (yet, though I
might), so the short answer is: No, my arrangement isn't available.

Lelia

---------------------------------------------------------------------

   
     Copyright © Woodwind.Org, Inc. All Rights Reserved    Privacy Policy    Contact charette@woodwind.org