Copyright, Creativity & Aesthetics, by way of "Rent"

Does copyright encourage creativity? Or discourage it?

I'm not sure how many people saw this article from Playbill.com the other day, which talks about a director's change to the ending of Rent:

The final scene was missing roughly five lines of dialogue. For those unfamiliar with the musical adapted from Puccini's La Bohème, the character of Mimi dies and returns to life in the final moments of the script.

Director and faculty member Diane Smith-Sadak told Playbill.com that she removed the final lines where Mimi describes her near-death experience, creating a "more ambiguous" ending about Mimi's fate, in order to point toward the savage realities of people suffering from AIDS and addiction in the early 1990s (a time when many of the antiviral drugs that save lives today, were yet unavailable).

via Yung6 at Wikimedia CommonsLet me start by saying I would love to see this production. If you know the story of opera Rent was based on, La Bohème, you know that Jonathan Larson changed the ending of the opera; Mimi does not live in the opera. (Larson wanted to have a more uplifting ending to the show.) This "new" ending is intriguing, and I wonder what different emotions and reactions it would bring to the audience.

But, more to the point, I want to ask what this means for copyright and creativity, and creative control. (Yes, it's *another* copyright blog post from a musician. 2nd in popularity of blog posts, behind the death of classical music.)

Things like this happen frequently in community productions of musicals, regardless of the language in the contracts and licensing agreements. I've played numerous shows with cuts to entire songs, dialogue, and - in one particularly horrible instance - a song that had numerous cuts (to "make it more like the CD") that involved too many page turns and arrows to keep track of where to read. What make this case different is that the cuts quickly turned into "Internet wildfire" and caught the attention of MTI, who directed the university to reinstate the missing lines.

That this happens frequently doesn't necessarily make it right. You can't claim mob mentality as a protection against a law.

But what I find curious about this incident is that this happens frequently in theatre works that are no longer covered by copyright. Think about the Shakespeare plays you've seen: how many of them were set in Elizabethan England? How many were set in a different time or place (Fascist Spain seems to be an overly common setting)?

Or operas. Directors frequently change the setting of the original opera (as Alex Ross mentions in Listen to This). Language is either modernized or translated from the original. Music is added or cut based on the latest scholarship.

This comes back to the question posed above: in this case, did copyright protect Larson's original vision of Rent? Did it discourage creativity by stifling part of the director's vision for her production? If a director can modify Shakespeare, why can't one modify Larson?

Adding another layer to this thought is that the music in Rent isn't 100% Larson. His untimely death led original music director Tim Weil to rearrange some of the music and orchestrations.

I also think this reflects how we view certain works. Some things are set in stone, not to be adjusted. Musical theatre, though going through a constant revision process in early try-outs and previews, is thought to be "set" when it's licensed for groups to perform across the country. Beethoven's music should be played as seen on the page (preferably from an ürtext edition). But a jazz song is meant to be improvised around, to use the composer's ideas as a starting point in creativity. It's almost expected that a director will modify elements of a Shakespeare play.

Is there a way to reconcile copyright, creativity, and - unmentioned until now - aesthetics? Aesthetic value is basically what this all comes down to. How we view music - is it an activity, an experience, a "work" similar to plastic arts? - dictates how we view copyright.

More than the "is art a commodity?" question, I think aesthetics dictate our opinions on copyright - at least, our gut instincts on the topic.

I don't claim to have a solution to the myriad of copyright issues in today's music world. Sometimes I think copyright laws are too draconian; sometimes I think they're fair. I'm sure most people think that way, too.

But think for a moment about what you think about music and aesthetics. Does it - more or less - align with your ideas on copyright? I'm interested in hearing what you think!

Playlist - w/e 4/24/11

• Aurora, Patrick Williams Big Band
• Spirit Music, Bob Brookmeyer
• Rhapsody in Blue, Marcus Roberts
• Three Stories, Eldar Djangirov
• Neruda Songs, Peter Lieberson
• Chasing the Day: The Music of Will Van Dyke
• Preludes, Books 1 & 2, Richard Danielpour

Playlist - w/e 4/17/11

• Chasing the Day: The Music of Will van Dyke
• Quatuor Ebène: Ravel, Debussy, Fauré String Quartets
• My Fair Lady (original Broadway cast)
• Legally Blonde (London cast)
• Sweeney Todd (original Broadway cast)
• Rhapsody in Blue, etc. (Riccardo Chailly, Stefano Bollani & Gewandhausorchester Leipzig)

"There's another way of making music ..."

"... by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.” This quote from Gavin Bryars points to his mission as a composer, and is revealed through some of his new music for piano.

via www.gavinbryars.comYou won’t find much in Gavin Bryars’ new Piano Concerto that is harsh to the ears. The stereotypical avant-garde music of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries is far removed from the music on the new Naxos release of Bryars’ Piano Concerto (The Solway Canal), After Handel’s Vespers and Ramble on Cortona.

The British composer is perhaps best known for his pieces The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Both were written for atypical ensembles, including tape and other electronics, and were first recorded on Brian Eno’s record label in the 1970s. (They have since been revised and rerecorded). It’s telling that his early music was released on Eno’s record label; it’s not ambient music, but Bryars’ music has a familial relationship with it. Bryars’ was a student of John Cage and his compositions place him near the better known Gorecki and Pärt on the musical family tree. Here, Bryars looks to more traditional ensembles and forms on one of the finer classical music releases of the first part of 2011.

via www.naxos.comThe Piano Concerto is not one that features technical flair and drama. An audience won’t instinctively leap to its feet as they would at the end of a Rachmaninov concerto. But that doesn’t make it any less intriguing or enjoyable. What you’ll hear, instead, is a nearly 30-minute piece for piano, men’s chorus and orchestra that borders between impressionistic and post-minimalist styles, full of dark, evocative sounds and subtlety. The piano serves as a mentor to the ensemble, guiding and handing off material to the orchestra, rather than forcing them to serve a more subservient role as in more traditional concerti.

The piece opens simply enough, with open 5ths played by the orchestra and piano, but soon the tonal center shifts around, never quite leaving A minor and C major, but never quite settling on it, either. Chromaticism recurs through the piece, often on the outlying edges of the score, but never intrudes enough for the piece to lose its tonal feel. The imagery of the sonnets by Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and the haunting quality of the men’s chorus are unusual in the context of a piano concerto, but suit this piece and Bryars’ compositional style well. This is an unobtrusive piece, whose beauty lies in its simplicity. It’s the first glimpse of a flower bud underneath the snow of a long winter.

The opening pieces on the album are for solo piano. After Handel’s Vespers was originally written for the harpsichord, and translates well to the piano. Ramble on Cortona is Bryars’ first work for solo piano, the dedicatee, like the Piano Concerto, being pianist van Raat. Both works acknowledge earlier music – Vespers from the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, Ramble from the 13^th Century – but take full advantage of the piano’s sonorities and the capabilities of a contemporary composer. As Bryars has said, “one of the challenges I enjoy is writing in the light of history … I take great sustenance from the music of the past.” He has the ability to reference and incorporate earlier styles without losing his own voice.

The performances by piano soloist Ralph van Raat, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and the men of the Capella Amsterdam suit the music well. Raat has a touch that brings out the lyrical qualities of Bryars’ music, and the Philharmonic lingers on every note in the Piano Concerto until the last possible minute, absorbing themselves and the listener in the moments at hand.

Kudos to Naxos for this fine album, and for continuing to release new music. The label has long moved from simply being a clearinghouse of “budget classical” records made by Eastern European musicians to one of the foremost record labels for new and previously unrecorded classical music.

American Salute

For today, the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, here’s American Salute, a set of variations on “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” by Morton Gould:

The piece was originally written for orchestra and later transcribed for concert band by the composer.