On 14 Feb 2006 at 19:40, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > I am just curious why is it the profit model is ok for publishers, or > orchestras, or record labels, or video productions, or the record > chains, that make profits from music that's in the public domain is > somehow "OK." But when an editor makes his case in court (and wins), > he's seen as the Antichrist for doing it?
1. I have never objected to contracts agreed to by two parties. If Hyperion wants to pay Sawkins, that's fine. If they don't, that's their right, too, within the law, which has not been changed by Sawkins's lawsuit. 2. the legal reasoning behind the decision is specious. Sawkins cannot be both a musicological editor and a co-composer of the works, which is de facto what he asked to be considered. It is bad for legal precedents to be set on grounds that are nonsensical for the area of real life on which they impinge. 3, I'm a musicologist. I make editions. I'd love to see them published. But I don't expect to ever gain any fair compensation for the time it has taken me to prepare them, because if I were paid that much, then the publisher could never make any money. But I would still be thrilled to see my editions published and performed. Why? Because they contribute to a community of musicians and scholars. They provide information that allows the music to live again. In the open source software world, they have the idea of the "gift economy," where individuals do a huge amount of work for no compensation and then share the fruits of that labor with others. I see my role as an editor in the musical world as similar. My gift is not performing and my reward is not monetary -- my reward is having done something that gets the music performed. If you're in musicology for the money, then I think you've made a bad, bad mistake. Sawkins has broken the code of scholarship, in my estimation. He's transgressed the ground rules of the musical economy. He may have badly broken the system in doing so -- a valuable record label may go under entirely because of his actions. Others may have to scale back their production as a result of Hyperion's failed defense of the present system. Somehow, I doubt that Sawkins was ultimately motivated by greed, though. I think it's much more likely that his motivation was entirely ego-driven, that he felt he'd done something so incredibly important and significant that it deserved recognition beyond what he was getting in the liner notes, the apprecation of the people for whom he prepared the editions, and the editing fee. And worst of all, he's a hypocrite for asking to be considered "co- composer" while doing nothing more than every musicologist does every day when they prepare editions from flawed sources. The task of the musicologist in editing is to recover as much of the intended musical text from the flawed and incomplete sources available. If that is the goal, it is one that cannot be reconciled with being paid for "originality" in that process, as the controlling conception is that of the composer, who is long dead. Sawkins is being paid for being de Lalande's centuries-removed secretary. And all the disastrous results of this for the early music world aside, that is what most disgusts me -- he's stealing credit for conceptions that are someone else's. It's cheating. And to me as an academic, misrepresenting someone else's work as your own is perhaps the highest crime. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
