William Alwyn

[gvans]

William Alwyn (1905-1985), a Brit, made a living writing film scores. He was a keen classical composer as well, an heir of sorts to Ralph Vaughn Williams (I know, I know, it's dangerous to categorize). We're playing his Rhapsody for Piano Quartet, and I find it beautiful, evocative, just dissonant enough, and a blast to play.

Does anyone else have experience playing Alwyn? He has two piano concertos, a number of solo piano pieces, and much else to offer.

Another question: since the poor chap's only been dead 28 years (not the requisite 70), are there copyright issues with putting up a performance (assuming we get lucky enough to play a decent version) on You-tube? 

[j_menz]

I'm embarrassed to say he's a new one to me, though I must have heard his music - he did the score for A Night to Remember, after all.

There are a number of performances of his work already on YT, including amateur performances, so I doubt you'll get into trouble. You can always take it down if anyone objects, and I suspect given the relative obscurity of his non film work no other remedy would be sought or obtainable.

[gvans]

Thanks for your thoughts, j. We're also looking at an Eliott Carter piece, a NY composer who just died a year ago at the age of 103. There may be copyright issues with that one, too, no?

[j_menz]

Probably moreso. If the work is still in publication, it's probably a good idea to email the publisher on a "we're planning this, let me know if you object" basis. Check if it's been recorded, too.

[gvans]

Thanks for your thoughts, j, I agree. An e-mail to the publisher is a good idea; they will probably say "no."

The copyright thing can get ugly. Robert Greenburg, a composer/musicologist who does lectures for the Teaching Company, had to leave Bela Bartok's compositions off his course, "30 Greatest Orchestral Works," because the family/lawyers holding the copyrights refused to let him play a few snippets. So, Concerto for Orchestra and his three piano concertos (all of which are superb; I especially like #3, the one he composed for his wife) got excluded. Pretty foolish of them, really, when you consider how many people get intrigued by his lectures and go out and buy CD's.

Soon Bela will be gone 70 years, though...and his music will be released from bondage.

[ahinton]

Thanks for your thoughts, j, I agree. An e-mail to the publisher is a good idea; they will probably say "no."

The copyright thing can get ugly. Robert Greenburg, a composer/musicologist who does lectures for the Teaching Company, had to leave Bela Bartok's compositions off his course, "30 Greatest Orchestral Works," because the family/lawyers holding the copyrights refused to let him play a few snippets. So, Concerto for Orchestra and his three piano concertos (all of which are superb; I especially like #3, the one he composed for his wife) got excluded. Pretty foolish of them, really, when you consider how many people get intrigued by his lectures and go out and buy CD's.

Soon Bela will be gone 70 years, though...and his music will be released from bondage.

Copyright isn't by definition "bondage", as you suggest. For starters, it doesn't mean that performances of copyright works is wholly impermissible and, if it did, we'd never hear any music legally until its composer had been dead for at least 70 years. Under present legislation, Alwyn goes out of copyright on 1 January 2066 and Carter on 1 January 2083, but that doesn't mean the expiry of publisher copyrights. Whilst there are occasions on which copyright owners can restrict the public use of music whose copyright they hold, this is relatively unusual, especially in the case of published works; performance royalties are in any case usually payable on tghe public airing of copyright music.

Carter's copyright is an interesting case; his song My Love is in a Light Attire (a James Joyce setting), his earliest known extant work, dates from 1928 and will have been in copyright for almost 155 years before it enters the public domain; the earliest known works of Ornstein (dating from around 1911) could have been in copyright even longer still, since his term would ordinarily expire on 1 January 2073, but I believe that his works have been put into the public domain by his exectors at their choice.

Best,

Alistair

[gvans]

Thanks, Allstair. May I try to summarize my understanding of what you said in plain (non-legal) English?

It's OK to perform modern (non-copyright expired) music--depending on the financial compensation you do or do not receive for it. But it's not OK to record and disseminate on public media.

Does this include You-tube? Does a You-tube clip with, say, one or two hundred viewers correspond to a "public airing", i.e., the same as a broadcast on BBC or PBS?

Excuse me, but having to beg for permission strikes me as a sort of bondage. My cousin, a professor of composition at U. of Hartford, recently premiered his violin concerto with the Hartford Symphony. I asked him to send me a recording, but he demurred, unwilling to release his private recording because of union issues with the orchestra, performance rights issues with the university, and about twenty other reasons. 

There are times when one must agree Shakespeare had it right vis a vis lawyers. Certainly the propagation of modern art music is hindered by copyright issues.

Warm regards,

Glenn

[ahinton]

Thanks, Allstair. May I try to summarize my understanding of what you said in plain (non-legal) English?

It's OK to perform modern (non-copyright expired) music--depending on the financial compensation you do or do not receive for it. But it's not OK to record and disseminate on public media.

Does this include You-tube? Does a You-tube clip with, say, one or two hundred viewers correspond to a "public airing", i.e., the same as a broadcast on BBC or PBS?

It is indeed OK to do this, especially in the case of published copyright music in print; it's up to the venue where it's performed to make the appropriate returns to the royalty collecting organisation in the coutry concerned. It's OK to make commercial recordings, too, but the same applies to the record companies as it does to perforamance venues. You can make such recordings yourself but if you disseminate them you will need to seek permission and/or make returns similar to those made by record companies. Uploading to YouTube constitutes infringement unless written permission of the copyright owners, artists and anyone else involved in making the recording concerned (such as record companies).

Excuse me, but having to beg for permission strikes me as a sort of bondage. My cousin, a professor of composition at U. of Hartford, recently premiered his violin concerto with the Hartford Symphony. I asked him to send me a recording, but he demurred, unwilling to release his private recording because of union issues with the orchestra, performance rights issues with the university, and about twenty other reasons.

I do not know the facts of this particular case beyond what you have mentioned, but I assume that your cousin is the copyright powner of his violin concerto so he can do what he likes provided that the rights of the players are not compromised; this will depend upon the contractual arrangements under which they performed and agreed to be recorded and has nothing to do with copyright in the music itself (the same would apply to the performers had your cousin played one of Szymanowski's concertose instead). Even tghen, he could have made a copy of the recording for you provided that you agreed not to disseminate it in any way; this again would apply equally to copyright music performances as it would to performances of public domain works. This is just a simple bare-bones explanation but it's the best that I can provide under the circumstances.

There are times when one must agree Shakespeare had it right vis a vis lawyers. Certainly the propagation of modern art music is hindered by copyright issues.

It is not - at least not in principle - as I hope to have demonstrated above; in any case, this isn't about lawyers per se, since lawyers are there to function in the law but governments are the ones who make the laws in the first place. The only copyright issues that apply to music in copyright that do not apply to music that's in the public domain is that the copyright owner/s are usually due royalties on the former.

Best,

Alistair

[gvans]

[Propagation of modern music] is not [hindered by copyright/legal issues] - at least not in principle.

Aye, there's the rub.

Discuss this with Robert Greenburg, or Steven Gryc (my cousin). In the former's case, he has come out saying in no uncertain terms that modern legal issues, hard for 18th and 19th century musicians to ever have imagined, have circumscribed the free and wide dissemination of modern art music. In my cousin's case, he was not allowed to send out any recordings to anyone for any reason, without first paying royalties to the symphony musicians.

The big-buck legalese that has permeated hip-hop, rock n' roll, and country has set precedents for art music that do not help it gain in popularity. Admittedly, this is only part of the reason modern music has had a hard time gaining popularity, but it is a real issue.

[ahinton]

Discuss this with Robert Greenburg, or Steven Gryc (my cousin). In the former's case, he has come out saying in no uncertain terms that modern legal issues, hard for 18th and 19th century musicians to ever have imagined, have circumscribed the free and wide dissemination of modern art music. In my cousin's case, he was not allowed to send out any recordings to anyone for any reason, without first paying royalties to the symphony musicians.

All that you tell us here about Mr Greenburg's statement is an unsupported opinion; he does not say (or you do not report him as saying) on what specific grounds he believes this to be the case; that's the first thing that I'd ask him were I inded to discuss it with him. In your cousin's case, as I wrote previously, the same situation would have applied (if the orchestral musicians' contracts provided for this) to a recording of them playing anything, not just copyright music.

The big-buck legalese that has permeated hip-hop, rock n' roll, and country has set precedents for art music that do not help it gain in popularity. Admittedly, this is only part of the reason modern music has had a hard time gaining popularity, but it is a real issue.

There is no such "big-buck legalese"; that's a myth. If there were, how would you account for the many hundreds of thousands of CDs of copyright music being issued regularly or the broadcasts of copyright music all over the world? In any case, we're talking copyright music here, not just "modern music" (i.e. music written by living or recently deceased composers).

Copyright music includes Rachmaninov (just!), Bartók, Webern, Strauss, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten and many so many more composers who have been dead for a long time.

Composers' Estates can indeed occasionally be obstructive, but that's hardly the norm where copyright music is concerned. In any case, how would you seek to ensure that even this couldn't happen? The only way would be to dispense with intellectual property rights altogether, which would require prior agreement from every country that recognises them; the protracted proceedings that this would involve - even if such global agreement in principle could first be secured - would really give big-shot lawyers a lot of work, human rights lawyers in particular, the cost in both time and money would be immense and the likelihood is that the lawyers' work would ultimately guarantee that wholesale disposal of such rights would fail.

Best,

Alistair

[gvans]

You are clearly an expert on these matters, I am not. I defer to your opinions and masterful use of abstruse legal language. (As I mentioned, Greenburg had problems using Bartok's works in his lectures, those were the specific grounds.)

Anyway...I confess to googling you and am quite impressed by your compositional history and oeuvre.

So...if should I buy/download your Piano Trio No. 2 (I'm a sucker for piano trios), would you mind if we played it at a free library concert of new music? Would we be charged a fee? Could we, if we make a decent job of it, put it up on YT?

Just curious...

[ahinton]

You are clearly an expert on these matters, I am not. I defer to your opinions and masterful use of abstruse legal language. (As I mentioned, Greenburg had problems using Bartok's works in his lectures, those were the specific grounds.)

I don't pretend to be an expert but I do have a little first-hand experience in these issues. I have used no specifically "legal language", abstruse or otherwise, in what I've posted on this and, for the record, I am a composer, not an intellectual property lawyer! I don't understand the nature or cause of the problem encountered by Greenburg in the Bartók's music is almost all published and in print and widely performed without restriction.

So...if should I buy/download your Piano Trio No. 2 (I'm a sucker for piano trios), would you mind if we played it at a free library concert of new music? Would we be charged a fee? Could we, if we make a decent job of it, put it up on YT?

To be honest, it's not a very good piece and I also no longer have the string parts for it. Were it to be performed at a concet with free admission, the likelihood is that no royalties would be forthcoming and there would be no objection in principle to this being done. Technically, I would be within my rights to charge a fee for its use there but would not do so. Recording it and uploading it to YouTube, however, is quite another matter. Thank you for your enquiries, though.

It's probably now well past time to return to the thread topic!
Best,

Alistair