At 1:05 PM -0500 11/15/06, dhbailey wrote:
But you are free to do all the arrangement of the original Silent Night tune you want -- it's readily available in public domain publications so there'd be no case against you from any descendants of Gruber.
Quite true, but unless I remember incorrectly the English translation of the original German lyrics may still be in copyright. Or I might be thinking of the "What Child Is This" lyrics for Greensleeves. Or those may be late 19th century translations that are PD in any case at this late date.
It gets curiouser and curiouser as the most recent rewrites of the copyright law have stipulated that the owner of a manuscript which has NEVER been published, despite its age, owns the copyright in that manuscript should he/she decide to publish it. So if you find some old book bound with music papers which contain a manuscript aria by Bach, you would own the copyright in that aria as long as it hasn't been published ever before. If, however, it was published during Bach's lifetime, or at any point since, you don't own the copyight even though you may own the original manuscript.
And that gets into the tangle of what, exactly, defines "publication," although there's probably a legal definition somewhere. What, in other words, is the status of music that survives in manuscript (sometimes multiple manuscripts) from before the first publication of music set in movable type in 1501? "Publication" WAS by manuscript copies through most of music history! And it was in multiple copies, but copies made one at a time by individual scribes or teams in a professional scriptorium. I've never seen a satisfactory explanation of that question.
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 _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
