As far as I know, Peter and the Wolf is back under protection.
Evidence of that is that Dover made some of their Prokofiev orchestral
scores unavailable (glad I already had a copy).
You can check the ASCAP website for a list of restored works. It's up
to you to figure out whether the work has lived out its "natural" life.
I hear pdinfo.com or .org is a good resource, but I haven't checked it
out myself, though I've heard that ASCAP and BMI both consult it.
On Jan 12, 2010, at 6:02 PM, Mark D Lew <markd...@earthlink.net> wrote:
On Jan 11, 2010, at 6:39 PM, Robert Patterson wrote:
I'm not sure there is "standard practice". The two std. rep. pieces
for orchestra with narration that come to mind are Peter and the Wolf
and Mendelssohn's MIdsummer Night's Dream. The Prokofiev includes the
entire narration in the score, as I believe also does the
Mendelssohn.
(The parts for both only have excerpts of the narration as needed.)
If it were me, I would include the entire narration in the score in
the pauses where they are to be delivered. At the very least I would
look at both those scores before making a final decision.
Fortunately,
both are available from Dover and hence in the public domain.
What's the story on Russian copyrights? I remember that a lot of
20th century Russian works were in the public domain long before
they otherwise would have been, on account of the fact that the
United States did not recognize Soviet copyrights.
I also remember that some time in the mid-1990s, after the Soviet
Union had ceased to exist, the United States began to recognize
Russian copyrights again, as a result of some trade agreement, and a
whole lot of Russian works that had been available were pulled from
the shelves and went out of print.
So what does that mean for something like Peter and the Wolf? Is it
truly in the public domain? Or is it just easily available but
technically under protection now?
As an American, I'm mostly interested in U.S. law but presumably the
same questions apply to Europe and elsewhere. Peter and the Wolf
was published in 1936 and Prokofiev died in 1953, so it seems to me
that the work ought to be protected under either the American or
European rules. (But I hope I'm wrong, because there's a certain
Shostakovich prelude I'd love to arrange....)
mdl
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