Music labels are worried that the recent judgment against Hyperion requiring the company to pay royalties to a musicologist who had prepared scores will kill certain kinds of recording. “What may set precedent is that, while musicologists have sometimes received recording royalties before, a court had never required a company to pay them, as far as I know. To require payment means classifying a musicologist with composers, who gained the right to royalties from for-profit performance of their work over a century ago. This may be why, whatever the legal merits, many people have decried the decision.”
Tag: 08.24.05
How To Fix A City Waterfront
Many waterfront cities have…well, blighted waterfronts. “How to reclaim all that wasted property? There are plenty of models: the self-consciously quaint shopping mall at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, slowly turning into a dilapidated relic; the strip of skater heaven along the Hudson River; the maritime Pacific Bell stadium in San Francisco; the harborside courthouse in Boston. Everyone with a slice of waterfront to save, however modest, should also make a pilgrimage to the North Fork village of Greenport, where Mayor David Kapell’s decade-long quest to restore a patch of bayside blight has finally come to fruition.”
California’s New Poet Laureate Al Young On Art:
“It is only very young and inexperienced cultures that don’t understand that art and culture are the most important byproducts of any society. You’re not remembered for your armies or your navies…. You’re remembered for your music and for your stories. For your literature. For your dance. For your film. For your painting. For your great art. That is what ennobles a society.”
Steal It If It’s Anonymous?
“The classical music world has discovered a fact about copyright law that has long bothered folklorists and ethnomusicologists: under certain circumstances, the law allows individuals, in effect, to “privatize” works that are common property. Anonymous works handed down via oral tradition — the sort that make up the musical heritage of many small-scale societies — have always been vulnerable to legal appropriation.”
Book Critic Kipen Joins NEA
San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen has been named the National Endowment for the Arts’ new director of Literature. “Among his new responsibilities, Kipen will design and lead national leadership initiatives, develop partnerships to advance the literature field, and recommend panelists and manage the review process for literature applications.”
Philadelphia Orchestra And Philly Pops Merge
The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philly Pops have merged operation. “Musically, little will change. Peter Nero, 71, will continue to lead the Pops. The number of Philadelphia Orchestra players who currently gig with the Pops is not expected to grow. But the consolidation gives the Philadelphia Orchestra a chance to boost its budget and donor base and allows it to concentrate on its main mission.”
Norman Lebrecht, Performer
Norman Lebrecht is asked to narrate a performance of Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw”. “To study an orchestral masterpiece of this magnitude is pure pleasure, physical as much as intellectual. To perform it in a public concert hall is a privilege that beggars description, a moment where we are humbled by the materials we handle. I cannot remember everything. The seven minutes of Survivor pass like a flash and the reward of applause seems undeserved. I want to do it again, to do it better, to do it justice.”
Christiansen: Edinburgh International Fest Has Swooned
The Edinburgh Festival has lost its attractions as the Fringe has taken over, writes Rupert Christiansen. “Edinburgh has lost its dourness, dignity and mystique, surrendering its soul to swish boutiques and decadent youth. The Festival has, meanwhile, sprawled and spawned like some tentacular creature of the deep. The “official” selection of opera, ballet, classical concerts and foreign drama now makes up only a small element in an anarchic 24-hour carnival of performance that also embraces film, television and literature. In terms of both audience numbers and creative energy, the carnival is now Edinburgh’s motivating cultural force, leaving the International Festival marginalised.”
State Of The Art (Not So Good?)
A new Rand study on the visual arts, suggests that all is not as rosy as burgeoning museum attendance figures suggest. “At the same time that prices have reached headline-grabbing heights, the arts market has become increasingly like other asset markets. The value of an artist’s work is determined not, as was traditionally the case, by the consensus of experts, but increasingly by a small number of affluent buyers who are drawn to purchase works for their potential investment value.”
Into The Woods
Canadian composer R. Murray Schaefer is recreating one of his most famous pieces The Enchanted Forest, staged in actual wilderness. “The work follows the search for an abducted child by her companions and their encounters with a White Stag, a Wolf, a Marshhawk, a Shapeshifter and other forest denizens and deities on 12 different stages in the forest, the audience migrating through the trees from one to another.”