On Aug 26, 2007, at 8:07 PM, John Howell wrote:
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?
If I write a purely musical piece, with the instruction "to be sung to the words of [poem] by [poet]" I am not in violation of copyright because I have not actually used the text. If someone, following my instructions, performs the piece with the prescribed text, then they are no more (and no less) in violation of copyright than if they had read the poem aloud without music. Since people read copyrighted poems aloud all the time, I assume the copyright regulations regarding such things are relatively relaxed.
I wrote a piece in 1980 that used a poem by Vachel Lindsay, which the Lindsay estate (wh. of course was a corporation) demanded an exhorbitant fee to use. In response to this, I reset the music using only the vowels from the poem, together with an instruction that, upon expiry of the copyright, the full text was to be used instead. I also instructed that *prior* to the expiry of copyright, any performance using the vowels must have a program note explaining the copyright issue involved, and/or present a printed copy of the text.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://www.kallistimusic.com/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
