Dear Jerry,

I'd like to applaud on you and your team's effort in maintaining the wonderful Sequenza21 site. It has definitely open my eyes on the contemporary classical music scene.

Anyway, I would like to direct your attention to an interesting (and somewhat disturbing. Err… no, make that very disturbing) article by Miles Hoffman, titled "Music without Magic". The URL of this Wilson Quarterly article is http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=115960 Would love to see the response and reaction from you and the composer's forum to this article.

Thanks and best of regards,
Adam Quek
(Singapore)

From a distance of centuries, knowledgeable observers can usually discern when specific cultural developments within societies or civilizations reached their peaks. The experts may argue over precise dates and details, but the existence of the peaks themselves is rarely in question. In the case of Western music, we don’t have to wait centuries for a verdict. We can say with confidence that the system of tonal harmony that flowered from the 1600s to the mid-1900s represents the broad summit of human accomplishment, and that our subsequent attempts to find successors or substitutes for that system are efforts—more or less noble—along a downhill slope.

posted by Jerry Bowles 5:15 PM

Self-Promotion

Here's an announcement about a concert I have coming up. Please save the date and come if you can!




Monday, June 20th, doors open at 6pm; concert starts at 6:30pm sharp@OPIA Lounge 130 East 57th Street, NYC
(212) 688-3939 - Tickets $15 at door

Composers/performers Eve Beglarian & Corey Dargel are joined by flutist Margaret Lancaster for an evening of idiosyncratic art songs and electro-cabaret numbers. The trio combines Lancaster's virtuosic versatility with Beglarian's heartfelt sincerity and Dargel's deadpan delivery as the composers swap lead vocals and take on each other's songs. The program features selections from Beglarian's forthcoming CD FlamingOs of the New World, Dargel's Born and Raised (a Lancaster commission), Less Famous than You, and some new versions of old favorites.

This concert is part of the series 1-2-3-GO! Visit the series' website and check out the other concerts, almost every Monday evening this summer.

***

Also, my song "Ten Frames Per Second" appears on Gentle Electric, a new compilation by NYC club mogul and dj Larry Tee.

posted by Corey Dargel 5:03 PM

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Twilight of the Uninterested Patrons

I had a fascinating conversation a few weeks back with a PhD candidate in architecture. He is currently finishing up a dissertation on the construction of early 20th century Opera Houses, and it turns out that the main reason the opera houses in question were built was not for the furthering of the musical arts but for the furthering of the social lives of the upper class. For example. the allocation of space leans heavily toward private boxes, and the boxes loop all the way around from one side of the proscenium to the other so that people in those boxes can more easily see people in other boxes -- or rather, so that they can be seen by the people in the other boxes. For the people who paid for the houses to be built, going to the opera was a social event first and a musical event second, at best.

In modern times the economic elite have a different set of social pursuits that focuses much less on going to the theatre, and at the same time arts funding has been in steady decline. One wonders if there's a connection -- perhaps a portion of the missing money was really never primarily for the support of the arts anyway.

posted by Galen H. Brown 7:20 PM

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

More James Tenney

If, like me, you felt the two concerts of James Tenney in New York last month weren't nearly enough, you'll hopefully enjoy reading a series of conversations I had with him that week which we've just published on NewMusicBox. And for folks who missed those amazing concerts, be sure to watch the video which features clips from the Project Room performance as well as some rehearsal footage from the Whitney Altria.

Since May I've been madly attempting to track down every Tenney recording I don't already have. And to get the polemical waves gushing over here on Sequenza21, who else thinks that Tenney's For piano and... should be considered for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize?

posted by Frank J. Oteri 5:00 PM

another piano man

No, not the one in the UK (see the home page for details). Rather, Kyle Gann published an interesting blog entry about one of my favorite obscure "minimalist" composers: Charlemagne Palestine. I was so happy to see CP mentioned, I even blogged about it on my own site.

posted by David Toub 2:41 PM

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

I Me Mine

I've missed most of the Hyperion/Sawkins flap since I've spent the last few weeks launching a $250 Million capital campaign. (Keep your shirt on, boys and girls -- it's for medicine not music.) Sounds and Fury and Charles Downey have thorough discussions of the matter, and of course Alex Ross has been composing up a storm over at The Rest is Noise, as well as making his own case. Late as I am to the party, I still intend to make my own case.

It seems to me that the court made the right decision on the merits, but muddied the waters in not making one crucial semantic distinction clear: Sawkins has not been declared the owner of the copyright to a work of art, but to a work of scholarship. Hyperion's infringement is not in the performance of Lalande's work of musical art, but their performance of Sawkins's work of musical scholarship. Alex's jokes, while hilarious, are based on the false premise that the court declared Sawkins to be owner of the copyright to the art -- but if tonight I sit down with the manuscripts that Sawkins used and put together my own edition of the score I will hold copyright to that edition, Sawkins will hold copyright to his edition, and performers can choose which edition to use -- and thus, incidentally,which one of us they want to pay royalties to.

Hyperion's problem is that since Sawkins is the only scholar to have recreated the score to the public-domain works in question, Hyperion only has access to the unprotected material via a scholarly work which is protected by intellectual property law. Because of the nature of this protected scholarship, it is inextricably woven in with the unprotected art, and Hyperion can not claim that Ex Cathedra did not perform the scholarship in the recording.

We can illustrate this issue of "access" with a somewhat analogous scenario around paintings. Suppose that I own an original Monet. This painting is not protected by copyright, but I own the artifact itself, so I can control access to it -- and that means that I can dictate the terms under which the painting is photographed. So I photograph this painting and don't allow anyone else to do so -- The photograph and any poster prints I make from that photograph to sell to the public _are_ protected by copyright, so if you take my photograph and reproduce it for sale you are violating my copyright to my photograph and I can sue for damages. In this scenario the "work of art" is the original Monet artifact, whereas in the Hyperion/Sawkins case the "work of art" is the music itself. In this scenario I am the gatekeeper between the public and private domain, and in the Hyperion/Sawkins case Scholarship is the gatekeeper.

So given that Sawkins is suing Hyperion for making a recording based on his edition of the Lalande piece, why don't the publishing houses who release their own editions of, say, The Well tempered Clavier sue Glenn Gould for performing their editions? First of all, Gould probably played from an Urtext edition, in which case the only protected work is the typesetting itself -- surely not reproduced in his recording. But leaving that aside, I assume that in most cases any editorial adjustments to the work in a given edition are either (a) so minor as to not meet the test of substantially and covered by "fair use" (b) based not in the research of a single editor but in common knowledge and a long tradition of scholarship to which no single person can claim ownership, or (c) footnotes intended for the uneducated performer and ignored by the performer on the recording in question. Note, however, that it would indeed be a violation of copyright for me to reproduce verbatim, without permission, and in substantial amount, the editorial content of any protected edition in my own print edition. My understanding is that the reason the Dover editions of scores are so cheap is that they reprint facsimiles of old editions whose copyright has expired, thus saving the cost of hiring a typesetter and any musicology that might be required.

Anyway, since in most cases the protected scholarship doesn't make it into the recording (incidentally, the recording itself is protected by copyright law) the protection of the scholarship doesn't carry over into the recording, but in this case the scholarship did get carried over. Any argument that the court made the wrong decision must successfully argue that Hyperion's recording could have been made with a different (unprotected) edition of the score or directly from the source material with no substantial effect on the final product.

posted by Galen H. Brown 1:36 AM