On 3 Sep 2005 at 14:20, dhbailey wrote: > As for those editions with the yellow covers (and green ink?) I recall > looking at many of them and seeing no copyright notice at all. Not > being much of a pianist I don't have a very large library of piano > music, but I have never liked the layout of much of the music from > that publisher and so have tended to buy other editions. Thus I can't > lay my hands on any of them. > > But I do recall having looked at some and not seen any copyright claim > at all, other than on the cover design.
By modern standards, in which significant editorial intervention in an edition of public domain music allows you to have copyright on the edited edition, Schirmer would have justly claimed copyright on any number of their editions (most of which date from around 1900, so far as I can tell). There is significant editorial intervention in many of them, including added fingering, altered phrasing, and even recomposed figuration. And the Beethoven edition includes significant footnotes detailing the alterations to the text and suggestions for performance. Likewise with the Grieg Piano Concerto, for instance. Even their Bach editions have significant editorial intervention. I can't say if they stole the fingerings/slurrings/etc. from another publisher (someone would have to do a collation of the existing editions at the time), but the editions seem to me, barring being complete recreations of someone else's edition, to be fully deserving of copyright protection under our modern standards. Now, the law at the time they were printed was quite different, but I don't know exactly how it was different. And many of those Schirmer editions, precisely because of the performance-oriented editing, are extremely interesting documents for recovering evidence about late-19th-century performance practice and pedagogy. I think they're quite valuable documents and somebody should study them in detail. Now, if you want a publisher who is dishonest, try the one with the PINK covers. . . -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
