On Feb 14, 2006, at 3:03 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
The musicological endeavor by definition is *not* compositional. The editor of an edition is BY DEFINITION a slave to the original composer's intentions.
As a composer, I would certainly like it if this were so, but it very plainly is not. Editions are prepared all the time for reasons irrelevant to or even in direct opposition to the composer's intent. Simplified versions. Cut or excerpted versions. Modernized versions. Speculative reconstructions. I could go on and on. The line between editing and arrangement is an extremely blurry one, and in US copyright law it is not and as far as I know never has been drawn.
Finding that this act is worthy of performance royalties will have only one result: fewer new editions will be prepared for recordings, or the editions will be prepared by performers instead of scholars. Or, the recordings won't happen at all if a performance royalty must be paid to the editor. The Hyperion decision is a Pyrrhic victory that will ultimately be a disaster for recording companies, performing groups and editors.
The US experience simply does not bear that out. That edited versions of old music are entitled to performance and mechanical royalties is long established here (as, e.g., when Hildegarde Press about 10 years ago successfully sued recording companies that used its editions of Hildegarde von Bingen w.o credit or compensation) and has put no crimp in performance or recording.
The notion that composers and scholars should be good socialists while everybody else has their hand out is deeply ingrained in the classical community--but that don't make it right.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
