At 5:32 PM -0400 6/27/06, Andrew Stiller wrote:
On Jun 24, 2006, at 6:02 PM, John Howell wrote:
At 4:12 PM -0400 6/24/06, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
At 02:14 PM 6/24/06 -0400, John Howell wrote:
And let's not forget that the development of non-traditional
notations in the 20th century was driven by one and only one
non-musical requirement: music could not be copyrighted unless it
could be represented on paper. Since it WAS necessary, composers
developed those notations,
just my own logical inference, based on no research whatsoever.
Item: U.S. copyright law of 1909 only covered music rendered on
paper. (I don't know whether the law in other countries was
similar.)
Radical changes in music notation did not occur until nearly half a
century later.
Not surprising, since most music before WW 2 could be represented
just fine in conventional notation. (I'm not sure about Messiaen
since I've never studied his music.) Did Cowell's "The Banshee"
exist in conventional notation?
Furthermore, the "paper only" requirement goes back to the
earliest US music copyright law--1840s I believe--yet this triggered
no explosion of new notations for over a century.
1831 if I remember correctly, just in time to benefit Stephen
Foster's publishers (that reference book is at school). But not
really surprising because nobody fixed music except in conventional
notation (give or take the Sacred Harp and Tonic Sol-Fa notation).
No recordings were possible; therefore the question of copyrighting
music that existed only in recordings never occurred to anyone. And
the Copyright Act of 1909 was in part a reaction to the piano-roll
companies, but it did not grant copyright protection to those piano
rolls or to any other "mechanical" representation of music until, I
think, 1972, in anticipation of the debates that led to the 1976
revision.
I certainly take your point, though.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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