hyperion-records.co.uk/comments.html
I am so sorry! I have read the judgement carefully, and I think it shows only too clearly that the law is indeed an ass, and a patently unmusical animal at that.
DAIM
Leslie Howard (Pianist)
I am so sorry! I have read the judgement carefully, and I think it shows only too clearly that the law is indeed an ass, and a patently unmusical animal at that.
The most dangerous feature of the case, apart from the swinging costs to Hyperion, is the wider implication that any work whatsoever made to produce a performing edition implies a new copyright. In my experience, even the most commonly performed works are very often subject to minor editorial intervention (as distinct from interpretative intervention) by performers. Does the common conductor’s decision to double a woodwind part in a classical symphony now count as new composition? Or does the common addition of a timpani stroke to the last note of the first movement of Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony make it a new copyright work? These have, at least in the terms of the judgement, the merit of actual sound alteration to the works.
The figured bass argument is totally bogus, and you should have been able to demonstrate that any competent music student, given the instrumental lines of a baroque piece, would have no difficulty whatsoever in adding the figures to the bass, since they are entirely predicated by the music already extant above and related to the bass line. I don’t see how this point was not apparently made. In any case, any competent keyboard player would be able to produce the correct harmonies by reading the score – he would never be faced with just a bass line – and might well perform without regarding any of the printed figuring whatsoever, and yet still produce the original composer’s harmonic intentions.
The Pandora’s box now opened implies a possible avalanche of claims upon record companies and similar organisations for works where editorial intervention has been significantly greater than Sawkins’s pretty small-beer preparation of Lalande. The composition of new notes would seem to be even more important than bass-figuring, or repairing a deficient viola part, and there are simply thousands of recorded works where “composition” has taken place – either by way of completing unfinished works, or by repairing minor lacunae in original texts. Even the choice between two available readings of a passage may now be seen to count as an original act of composition. The possibilities for new litigation would seem almost infinite.
And the judgement misses completely the question of improvisation, whether realization of a bass (figured or not), the ornamentation of a line, inflected notes, musica ficta, jazz, and a host of kindred things. Does the snare drummer in a performance of Nielsen’s 5th Symphony now apply to register the work as his own just because Nielsen requires him to improvise? Or has Amelita Galli-Curci been deprived for years of royalties because of the creative liberties she took with the texts of Rossini?
As you know, in order to prepare the texts for my Liszt recordings, I made literally tens of thousands of editorial judgements, virtually all of them with an aural implication, over a period of nearly twenty years, and the result of countless hours of work. Am I now entitled to register Liszt’s entire piano oeuvre as my own, and sue you, the BBC, and hundreds of other organisations for royalties? I think not, and I pray that others similarly placed would agree. After all, for a conscientious performer, the preparation of a text, no matter how apparently stone-cast, becomes a constant question of editorial judgement. But this, in my view, is not “composition”.
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hahaha
in da meantime da 
azked fo a raize 
hahahahaha, da charitable DOC
hahahahah da dumb hyp exez. now tiz da perfect oppahtunity to fire da 
n hire da 
