John Howell wrote:
At 5:13 PM -0500 3/5/07, dhbailey wrote:
Aaron Copland "borrowed" pretty wholeheartedly from a Library of
Congress recording of Bonaparte's Retreat for Hoedown, and I've never
seen any credits given to the fiddler who made the recording -- I had
the great good fortune to hear the recording on the radio, and one
single person playing the fiddle played all the notes that Copland
took a whole orchestra to play (and they have problems!).
Fascinating!! But it depends on exactly what part of LC you're talking
about. If you're talking about the Archive of Folk Culture (not sure
what the real name for it is)--the Depression-Era project supervised by
Charles Seeger that went out and made field recordings representing
Appalachian music--then those field recordings ARE ALL IN THE PUBLIC
DOMAIN. (Made by the government, paid for by the government. Lots of
people don't realize that, and the son of one of the people involved in
the project claims, to this day, that he "owns" every song that was
collected. He doesn't, of course.
But if you're talking about recordings that were copyrighted and
deposited in LC's collection, that doesn't apply of course.
John
It's those Archive of Folk Culture recordings I'm speaking of, and I
know that there would be no copyright in the recording, but these days
(apart from any inherent copyright in the performance which was
recorded) there would also be a copyright in the embellishments which
the fiddler added (I've seen the music for Bonaparte's Retreat and it is
much simpler than either the recording or Copland's Hoedown) simply
because he created them. And these days also, recordings are looked on
as being "fixed form" which is necessary to prove copyright.
But the creators of the music, not the recording engineers, would be the
people who "own" each song.
As I said, however, the music which was recorded was never written down
before Copland did it, and therefore it didn't contain the
"c-in-a-circle" which was mandatory for copyright protection, along with
registration with the Copyright Office, so the folks who made the
recording, in their desire to record a bit of American folk culture
before it was lost, enabled an up and coming composer to get rich while
the person who actually created the music got not a penny for his creation.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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