SABC Media Libraries: musical scores

Showing posts with label musical scores. Show all posts

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Musings in the Music Library #6 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

The last in a series of vignettes which were 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.

"In the old days, orchestra libraries were there first and foremost to supply Their Orchestra with the materials required. All other orchestras were viewed with deep suspicion and mistrust, and educational and amateur organizations with outright anathema.

These deep feelings had practical roots beyond personal spites and jealousies: lost parts, horrible indelible markings and long term amnesia regarding return of material do not make life easy nor do they assist in looking after what is a very valuable investment.

But times change, and the modern age in South Africa has now established a new attitude: all these libraries were funded by public money and their collections should be open to all worthy users. That has included the University orchestras and the few and valiant amateur orchestras, but the main benefactors from this Library have been the East Cape Phil in PE and the Free State Symphony in Bloemfontein,, occasional but professional institutions that don’t have libraries at all.

The rental fee from this Library is unchanged from 20 years ago, and so the cost is within the budgets of our colleagues; without the Library’s assistance live orchestral performance would be even less frequent than it is."

Friday, April 20, 2012

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."

Friday, April 13, 2012

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.