Judge rules: Copyright royalties are due

[ASUmusicMAN]

Copyright royalties are due on editions of 18th century music, rules judge

July 8 2004

An editor has won his claim against a record company to be paid copyright royalties on editions he prepared of the 18th century French composer Michel-Richard de Lalande.

In 2001 Hyperion Records recorded four Lalande works for a disc called Music for the Sun King, for which the academic Dr Lionel Sawkins prepared new editions of three pieces, and which also used an existing edition by him. The work included recreating viola parts of one work, and making 600 corrections (319 of which were his own) to the bass figuring of another, working from a number of manuscripts.

It has been Hyperion’s policy to not pay copyright royalties on out of copyright composers. According to a statement issued by the label, ‘Hyperion has always understood musical copyright to be about originality. We contended that the three editions did not involve any significant composition of new music and therefore were not original musical works.’

Finish it here

[Shawn]

319 changes sounds like a fairly original showing of the work to me.

[dsoslglece]

319 changes sounds like a fairly original showing of the work to me.

Hello Shawn, you know, it all depends of what and for what purpose each change was made, and also, change by relation to what...

I remember for instance, quite a few years ago, I asked, in a conservatoire where I was in charge of the orchestra, for some of the viola pupils to play a viola barok concerto with the orchestra, expecting her to come with Stamitz or the like... So, she arrived with a Haendel concerto (?) never heard of haendel having ever written a viola concerto... but he wrote so much... I looked at the part... gosh, what a mess ! there where certainly some things from Haendel (and much more indeed than there is from Albinoni in "his" adagio composed by someone around 1952, on a 4 bars bass from Albinoni) but all the same it was so far from Haendel's style... for one thing, the viola part was using technical tricks about to come at least a century later on the viola... and the harmony was certainly not really from that period... Since that girl had already put some work on the piece, I finally decided to keep it, but I had to spend lot of work on it... in fact it was more rewriting it... and I dont know how to number the amount of changes I did... but all the same, I can assure you that it was more "original" by then than before...

Some time, the musicians in search of the truth have the hell on weels to go through, to find their way between all tracks, false tracks, misleading ones, additions, substractions, changes, all made by editors (by the way, in english, it is symptomatic that the word edition, or edit, has also the meaning of changing!) with the best of intents in their efforts to render the piece unrecognizable for later generations of players (and also some time to be able to cash some rights on that new publication :mellow: )

Of course, I may add, as a remark on the original post, that a judge, to give an opinion on such a subject, and even more, to take a legal decision, should have more than a serious knowledge on music, art, and on what consists a work of art... which is probably never the case.

For what de Lalande is concerned, I believe most of the originals should be kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and that should be the best source for it.... they are cool for what their old manuscripts are concerned, and rather like people to play them...

It's after all their patrimony...

And I always found them very helpful when I played some Claude Gervaise publications, or Litta "Le lac d'amour", or a Lesueur's mass.