Musings in the Music Library #5 - Copyright

Another vignette in a series that was sent by a fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library.

"Copyright is for the protection of the creator, an esoteric subdivision of legalities that makes Peace in the Middle East quite straightforward by comparison.  

As an introduction, South Africa and Canada recognize copyright as Death (of the creator, author, composer etc) plus Fifty years.  The European Union is now Death + 70, and the United States, in some applications and from certain dates, is Death + 90.  Even if you are a South African entity (like CPO) and you want to hire something out of copyright in South Africa for performance in South Africa, you may have to pay copyright because the Country of Origen of the Hired Material has a longer post-death law in place.  After this, it gets really complicated.  

For those audience members who despair at the relative lack of “modern” (that is, post 1930) music in concert programmes, I do ask that they judge CPO not too harshly.  

At time of writing the average fee for hiring copyright music is R300 per performance minute plus VAT plus Air Freight (usually from the UK), and that is just too expensive.  

Even if all the composers considered are long passed away, their publishing heirs can price their works right off the concert platform."

Related posts:

Musings in the Music Library #4

Musings in the Music Library #3

Musings in the Music Library #2

Musings in the Music Library #1

Musings in the Music Library #4 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Fellow librarian, Daniel Neal
- from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

"The standard title of where I work is the CPO Library, although this is for convenience.  What was the CTSO collection is owned by the Cape Orchestra Trust, and what was CAPAB’s still belongs to Artscape.  

The CTSO part is one of the oldest collections in South Africa, dating from 1913 the founding year of the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra, whereas CAPAB didn’t start their collection until 1971, when the Artscape building was finished.  But the antiquity of the CTSO collection is not just from purchases beginning from 1913.  

There are many score and parts sets that are much older; undocumented and impossible to ever discover their origins, I just speculate on how they ever got here. Even more, for some repertoire, why:  there are works here that never were popular enough to justify purchase.
 
My favorite to date are the Symphony no. 3 and the Cello Concerto of Joachim Raff, both unopened, unmarked and unplayed sets, first editions dating from around 1875.  

The stories of how and why they got from Berlin to Cape Town are long lost now, but nonetheless intriguing."    

Part of a series of posts.



Related posts:

Musings in the Music Library #1

Musings in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Musings in the Music Library #3 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Musings in the Music Library #3 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Another vignette in a series which was sent by  fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library, in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

An orchestra library is not a place of research or reference, although it does have certain capacities in that medium.  

I’ll get an email from some unknown in Australia who is looking for data concerning their great grandfather who played double bass in the Cape Town Orchestra in the 20s…or was it the 30s?  Can I provide them with anything?  And I can’t, unfortunately.  

To a lesser extent I will be asked for recordings of certain works, and very rarely some musicological question (although Google and Wikipedia seem to have taken up a lot of this in the last ten years).  

In essence the Library is there to provide scores and parts for specific performances.  

The easy bit is to pull the file boxes off the shelves and load the parts folders.  The hard bit is to find, somehow and with limited budget, musical material that the Library doesn’t have!"

Related posts:


Musing in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library 

Musings in the Music Library #1

The SABC Music Library – interview with the intern

This is the first post of a series of posts of interviews with personnel in the SABC Media Libraries. I will be posing the same six questions to all of us.

We have five departments which fall under the SABC Media Libraries here at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. It is the SABC Music Library, the SABC Record Library, the SABC Information Library, the SABC Radio Archives and SABC Audio Restoration.

We work with different types of collections and different formats, and we are not always aware of what our colleagues are doing on a daily basis. This is a way of getting to know each other a little bit better with regards the work we do, and the importance of our collections in the broadcasting sector.

My first interview is with our intern that we have at the Music Library. Ignatia Madalane started to work with us just short of a year ago. She is unfortunately leaving us at the end of the month.
The SABC Music Library has musical instruments of the highest quality, as well as printed music scores which they rent out to professional orchestras or music organisations on a daily basis.

Iggy Madalane:

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourself. (Where you grew up, where and what you studied and your work experience before you joined the SABC Music Library)

Hi, I, Iggy, grew up in Witbank, now called Emalahleni (Place of Coal). I studied Business Practice at TUT for a year, then did Cost and Management Accounting, which I never finished because it was choking me. So I went to Wits where I studied music, majoring in classical voice.
Before coming to the SABC, I worked as a tutor at Wits. I also did some office admin work occasionally for the Music department. For the 4 years of my undergraduate studies at Wits, I worked in the SRC office as an office admin assistant. I have done a lot of performing, also as a solo artist. I joined a marimba band in 2005 and with this band we did a lot of performances, such as concerts, theatre productions, workshops, etc. We’ve just returned from Mexico, from participating in the international Marimba Festival which took place in Chiapas in November, 2010. I also had the privilege of working with some of South African’s most revered artists such as Professor Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, with composer, story-teller, ethnomusicologist, Pedro Espi-Sancis, as well as Jeff Maluleke and world renowned and award winning percussionist and composer Lukas Ligeti. 

2. Please tell us about a normal day in your office.

Providing our clients with the best service are our main priority, therefore we do our best to ensure that we provide them with their requests as effectively and efficiently and as promptly as possible.

3. Tell us more about your collection and the scope of material you need to preserve.

I think I can safely say that we need to preserve everything we have, and we need more material. One of these days, I am hoping that we will be able to digitize out collection seeing that everything and everyone is going digital. Companies like Apple and Blackberry are inventing digital music stands, which means that musicians will be moving away from the conventional way of reading music from a piece of paper, to downloading the music directly to their music stands. It’s only a matter of time before the frenzy hits South Africa and I am afraid if we do not get on with the programme we might be left with no business to run.

4. Do you struggle with technical difficulties, and if so, what?

Struggle? Are you kidding? I can go to campus square, buy groceries, come back and bake a cake while the computer is trying to log on.
Secondly, since our catalogue is not digitized, we always find ourselves having to either keep our clients waiting on the phone, or call them back (an expense which can be avoided), because we need to put the phone down and go search the carded catalogue to see if we have the music they require. 

5. If you have an anecdote about a specific piece of interesting music or musical instrument, please share it with us.

Did you know that The Ride of the Valkyries, which is a music except from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walkure was apparently used by some German soldiers during World War II. They played it just before they attacked in the Battle of Memel. This story was incorporated into the 1979 film Apocalypse Now where the music accompanies the ride of the helicopters while they attack a Vietnamese village. Therefore you might want to think twice before playing Wagner when having your Jewish friends over for dinner. 

6. Tell us why you enjoy doing the work that you do.

It is only in this field where you can learn something new every single day.

Questions and intro by Karen du Toit (SABC Radio Archivist)