Klarinet Archive - Posting 000107.txt from 2009/02

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Derivative Works
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:59:39 -0500

Martin Arnold wrote,
>I seem to recall that when an unofficial arrangement was
>made for Brass Band of Elgar's first symphony the critic
>of The Times, who complained about this' was rebuked
>by Elgar in their columns. He said that he would rather his
>music was heard in arrangement than not at all. It would
>seem that the objectors are those who make their living
>"on the backs" of the actual composers
>

Mark Charette replied,
>>I personally would be wary of extrapolating the
>>wishes of one composer to be the wishes of all
>>composers.
>>
>>An easy counterexample would be the works that
>>are pulled both from publication and performance
>>by composers themselves.
>>

Yes. I've hesitated to barge into this discussion because (a) I'm not a
lawyer and (b) as a composer, I'm a self-taught and self-published amateur,
giving my music away free of charge on the Sibelius site, and therefore wary
of making myself look like a pretentious fool if I write anything that seems
to compare my own preferences to those of important composers. But even
composers crawling around at the bottom of the food chain where I live do
have pride and preferences - and these vary a great deal, from the extreme
control-freaks who wish they could monitor performers' appoggiaturas with a
stopwatch and a decibel meter to the shameless and the desperate who care
nothing about copyright technicalities in their lust to do anything to get
performed by anybody, anywhere, even on a kazoo in the key of Off.

How to figure out where any one composer stands? Get in the way. I'm
somewhere in the middle of that road, fairly desperate but still relying on
copyright to give me some control. If somebody wants an arrangement, I do
prefer to decide whether or not it should be written and then write it
myself, rather than discover, belatedly, that someone's transcribed and
performed "Dancing with Ghillie Dhu" as an ocarina duet.

But there's one place where I think I can safely claim to speak for a
majority. If any of my music does end up professionally published, I won't
give half a rat's whisker if a musician wants to deal with an awkward page
turn by Xeroxing the pages, taping them together and splaying them across
two or more music stands. Realistically, in most performance venues, nobody
except the pianist gets a page-turner. If the publisher can't spend enough
per copy either to space out the music with the page turns in reasonable
places or to publish any "perpetual motion" part (where there's no good
place for a page turn) on one side of a long, accordion-folded sheet, then
performers have no choice but to memorize (depending on time constraints,
that's not always feasible) or to transfer the notes to a friendlier format.

In 60 years of life in a family full of professional and serious amateur
musicians and in several years of frequenting the Sibelius composers'
bulletin boards, I've *never* encountered a composer who objected to that
sort of thing. If I did meet a composer of that ilk, I'd suggest that she
or he get a life. If I ever found out that any publisher of mine threatened
to prosecute a musician for page-turn Xeroxing of a legally purchased part,
even if the Xeroxing had entailed illegally copying the entire part, then
I'd do my best to publicly humiliate the publisher into finding a higher and
better use of company resources. I hope and believe that most composers
would do the same. There's almost nothing that'll get a composer's fur up
faster than finding out about such a senseless impediment to attracting
performers.

Lelia Loban
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/Lelia_Loban
"There are two sides to a trumpeter's personality: there is the one that
lives only to lay waste to the woodwinds and strings, leaving them lying
blue and lifeless along the swath of destruction that is a trumpeter's fury;
then there's the dark side...."
--Irving Bush

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