Nigel Gatherer opined:
| John Chambers scribbled:
| > ...One of the effects of things like ABC on the Internet will be to
| > strengthen the position of traditional music. ...
| > ...people using the Net to find tunes are less likely to find his
| > compositions than they are to find the trad tunes that he published.
| > Yet another in a long list of examples of why the current concept of
| > "intellectual property" is doing more harm than good...
|
| I may be wrong, but you seem to be implying that if a tune isn't
| available free on the web it won't spread. I don't think that's the
| case at all; great tunes exist and proliferate because they're great
| tunes, and spread from musician to musician because they hear them,
You're right, of course. But you're reacting to the most extreme form
of what I was saying, and that's not what I meant at all. It's
obvious that many people learn tunes by ear, both from friends and
from recordings (or both). But many people also learn tunes from
printed forms. This is rapidly including electronic forms, including
things downloaded from the Net. It's not a black-or-white thing; it's
more a case of subtle pressure in favor of whatever is easiest to get
your hands on.
A case in point in my neighborhood: The one tune in my collection
whose owner has told me that I can't have it online in abc form is
Miss Rowan Davies. There is an active SCD crowd here in the Boston
area, most dances have live music, and most of the musicians read the
tunes from paper during the dance. (Or at least they have the paper
there as a reminder and a way to get agreement on which versions of
the tunes are being played.)
Miss Rowan Davies used to be one of our common waltz tunes. (Yeah, I
know it's a slow air, but it's also a fine waltz.) It is now a lot
less common than in was a few years ago. The reason is that I and
several other of the musical leaders now use mostly online versions
of tunes, from my site and several others. So now when we look for
waltzes to include in a packet of music for a dance, we don't find
this tune. This isn't really a problem, because there's no shortage
of nice waltzes. It just means that this particular tune isn't played
as often as before.
This doesn't mean that Miss Rowan Davies is never played. If we all
know it, it's likely to be suggested, because everyone loves it. When
I'm playing solo, I'll play it. But it is unlikely to be in a packet
of music, and if there's a musician who doesn't know it, it is
unlikely to be played.
So not being online won't kill a tune. It will only decrease the
chances of the tune being played by people who look for tunes on the
Net. This is slowly becoming a significant effect, though of course
it will never take complete control, because people will always learn
tunes from each other.
So far, I have only the one example of a tune that I've been told not
to put online. But the effect is probably a lot stronger than that,
because I and others are very aware of the copyright threat. This
means that we sometimes intentionally avoid transcribing tunes that
we know to be new, out of a general fear that we might get in trouble
for this. I've asked for and gotten permission for maybe a hundred
other tunes, so this is apparently not all that big a deal. But it's
still a worry. Also, asking for permission materially slows down the
process, and decreases the chances that a tune will be used. It
typically takes weeks to get permission to use a tune, even using
email. Most of the events I play are more of the "Hey, can you play
next Monday evening?" sort. So only tunes that I can use on short
notice get used.
One of the real advantages of having musicians online is that when
someone asks on Saturday if I can get a band together for Monday, I
can make up a set of music, put it on my web site, fire off an email
message, and people can grab the music. This often takes less than an
hour, and I can tell the dance leader that I have a band. Getting out
a packet of music by snail mail takes a couple of days, so it doesn't
work on such a time scale. The online approach means that I can get
the chosen tunes out to everyone today, and on Monday they'll have
looked them over and relearned the tunes that they haven't played for
a few years. This is a real win for everyone, especially the dancers.
It does exert a subtle pressure towards older tunes, due to the lack
of copyright threat to the online versions.
(The main problem here is the people who don't have abc or postscript
software on their machine. Maybe I should give up and include a .gif
file, too, despite the legal threat that gif entails. ;-)
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