John Howell wrote:
At 3:09 PM -0600 8/26/07, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Back in my cute-but-dumb days, I set several "forbidden" texts, and the
compositions are now not publishable or even performable (technically,
anyway). Good pieces, too.
It seems to me that there is a creative way around this, though
finding a publisher might be a challenge. I conceived of this scheme
in reference to strophic texts, inspired by 19th century U.S. hymnals,
where it was quite common to include words with no music, the
accompanist being obliged to supply the music from a tune book, which
contained mostly lyrics, but few words. I note that hymns are almost
all strophic, and that the scheme I describe may not work as well for
texts in other forms.
Now, since copyright prevents is your making a copy of the covered
material without permission, don't include most of the words of the
text of the copyright material in your setting. Rather, you music
everything else that would be in the printed score: notes, performance
directions, tempi, dynamics, &c. Where the lyric would customarily be
printed, include only the punctuation, and perhaps the occasional word
or short phrase from the intended text, as these are explicitly not
copyrightable. You could apparently link your music to the text by
giving it the same title as the text which inspired it, as titles are
not copyrightable in the U.S.
But you still wouldn't have, and couldn't have, without permission, the
text, so the logic of what your suggest escapes me. What would be the
point?
John
People would buy your music, people would buy a book with the poems in
it, and would combine the words and music on their own for performance.
I wonder what sort of hot water that would land them in, though, public
performance of copyrighted poetry for which no public performance
permission was sought and no public performance royalty was paid.
The music might be covered by ASCAP or BMI but the poetry probably
wouldn't be.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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