Klarinet Archive - Posting 000281.txt from 2006/03

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] K622 orchestral parts
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:06:25 -0500

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Adam Michlin wrote:
> Having gone through the process many times myself, I can say that
> creating an edition of a score and creating clean, accurate and
> consistent parts from said score is a significantly non-trivial task.
> Non-trivial enough to be an important reason as to why people pay good
> money for performing editions of Mozart's long out of copyright works.
> I should also add that when you're working from a composer's
> manuscript, non-trivial doesn't begin to cover the complications that
> can arise.

Of course creating an edition of a score is a non-trivial task. But I
don't see that, once a score exists, copying verbatim from it is such a
major issue. Especially if that process is truly "open source" in that
people can check your work and submit corrections.

B=C3=A4renreiter ought to have A horn parts for their K622 parts. They
don't. It would not be *that* difficult to create them and there are
plenty of people who would do so (like me) and plenty of others who
would check the parts for consistency with the score. The result would
be a good piece of work.

If I do this B=C3=A4renreiter will sue me for breach of copyright or lice=
nse
or whatever particular form of intellectual property violation they want
to pick up on. Yet, in doing this, I have filled a gap they have left,
and *they* will benefit from the work as much as anybody because I would
let them include the parts I created in their repertoire. (That's part
of "open source". Anyone can use it, sell it even, as they wish.)

> I particularly bristle at the thought that anyone with Finale or
> Sibelius can create performable and especially saleable editions in a
> matter of days in a world where so many people think nothing of
> photocopying music - "Oh, Mozart doesn't need the money." Yes, Mozart
> is dead, but there are people who depend on the sale of extremely well
> prepared scores and parts. There are also people who depend on the
> sale of not so well prepared scores and parts, but discriminating
> consumers are almost always able to do get what they pay for. In
> either case, much more than a few days of work us put into the
> product for sale.

It's not about the money. The operating system on which I am currently
working consists almost entirely of Free Software (in the sense of the
Free Software Foundation: http://www.fsf.org/). Most of the work done
on it was *not* done in exchange for money. Even though for some years
there have been companies and organisations paying software developers
to work on projects related to the OS and software, the results of their
work were not owned or sold by their employers: they were given away for
free, in more than one sense, in that I am not only free to *use* the
results as I wish but also to modify them and distribute them, changed
or otherwise.

People keep banging on about "sales" as if the only way to reward
someone for their work is with money. In fact there are plenty of other
ways. For starters, we as players have a great interest in there being
superior editions of works. How many of us would not give time and
energy to a project to create a fine score and parts of K622, if in
return that edition was truly free and open, not (just) in the sense of
cost but more importantly in the sense of distribution and ability to
create derivative works (such as creating an A horn part if it's not
provided)? We would not need financial reward; the benefit would be in
the existence of the fine score and parts to perform with (our real
interest). Likewise musical scholars have a professional interest in
the existence of fine scores. An open---and therefore
collaborative---development process of a score allows them too to see a
benefit, not financial, but in terms of the work they get back for
free. As in open source software development, one contributor maybe
puts in a day's work, but gets back 10 days' work from the others also
contributing.

Nor is it about the quality. In fact "open source" development is
well-known for being superior when it comes to removing bugs in a
program. Many such pieces of software are superior to any commercial
alternative; others fill niches that no commercial project is interested
in but which is nevertheless useful. As long as you have people with
expertise contributing, and good guidance, an "open" project can produce
exceptional quality.

> Short of finding the manuscript to K622 to base a new orchestral
> edition upon, I think even a meticulously prepared edition by Dan
> Leeson himself would have a hard time making much if any money

Exactly the reason to say, "To hell with this model of relying on
commercial interest to generate quality editions of works." In practice
there are other motivations which are far more persistent and
worthwhile. Incidentally by doing this you also undercut the people who
sell crap editions because they can.

> Mozart has been open source (figuratively speaking) for quite a time;
> neither the problem nor the solution.

No; Mozart has been public domain. That is to say, anybody can take the
sources and create a derivative of them, whether it's an "Urtext"
edition or Famous Soloist's This Is How I Play It Edition or a crap
cheap "we copied such-and-such the moment it was out of copyright and
made loads of mistakes" waste of shelf space.

However, scores, editions and parts remain firmly closed, both in the
sense of development---how the research is done that leads to an
edition---and licensing: the resulting edition is sold with conditions
that strongly limit what you can do with the musical text. Someone who
has a good idea---like an A horn part for K622---can't do anything about =
it.

By contrast in an open development and licensing model, *anyone* can
contribute. The project developers are not obliged to accept every
contribution---but conversely contributors who feel ignored can take the
existing material and go and create their own project with it. If
someone wants to do something, like include a transposed part (or a part
returned to the *correct* transposition), they can. If a publisher
wants to take the resulting data and present it especially nicely in a
nice edition which they sell, they can. If Oliver wants to take the
result and change <<< to cresc. or a trill to demisemiquavers, he can
(but this time he will really get egg on his face because he will not
even have the excuse of being afraid he will get sued).

I don't see the point, in an effective age of global electronic
communication, on relying on this shut-away method of developing
effective scores. We will always need musical experts to steer these
projects, but there's no reason why we should rely so heavily on closed
organisations to prepare editions in secret. There is a lot of
expertise in the musical community and it should be used directly.

-- Joe
=20

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