Over ten years ago, University of Denver professor Lawrence Golan filed a legal case to restore the public domain status of a number of works that were privatized in 1994 under an act of Congress. Now, after a decade of legal battles, the Supreme Court has ruled in Golan v. Holder to uphold the act which re-privatized works that had previously been public domain.

The result is that a number of previously free-to-perform pieces—including fairly standard repertoire by foreign composers like Stravinsky and Prokofiev—now must be paid for. This impedes the ability of ensembles on a tight budget, like Golan’s, to program contemporary works.

But the implications reach further than the programming of university symphonies. The plaintiff’s case also argued that artists will now be hindered by fear of using pieces that are currently in public domain, knowing that the government reserves the right to remove access to them later. The government’s ability to remove works from public domain was also called into question, but the Supreme Court voted 6-2 that the ability to do so falls “comfortably within Congress’… authority.”

The decision came as a great disappointment to musicians around the country. Golan’s case was supported by IMSLP, the online public-domain sheet music library that was recently involved in its own legal controversy.

It’s hard not to examine this copyright news in relation to the recent hubbub surrounding SOPA and PIPA. The government seems presently to uphold copyright law in a manner that is acceptable both for artists and consumers, and with the most recent legislature unequivocally rejected by the public, a solution seems more distant than ever.

Read More:

The Supreme Court’s Opinion, via supremecourt.gov

It seems, however, that the story is not quite over. The Boston Globe reported this week that the decision, through a vote on December 23^rd, was made without the presence of over a third of the board’s seventeen members, some of whom had been optimistic about the company’s ability to overcome its $0.5 million deficit—a fifth of its annual operating budget. Those absent included the company’s general director, Lesley Koenig, who was in California when she received a phone call indicating that her position would be eliminated by 2012.

Many opera attendees were angry to have been kept unaware of Opera Boston’s financial straits. Still, Donald Vaughan, president of the Boston Early Music Festival, wrote in a letter to the Boston Globe that the Opera Boston had been soliciting donations by postcards, phone calls, and emails for the past few years, and that the company’s disbanding should serve as “a wake-up call to help those companies that are still trying to survive.”

Opera Boston was known as the experimental sibling of the Boston Lyric Opera, which presents more mainstream works. The BLO is reportedly financially secure. Opera Boston’s final show, Mozart’s one-act opera Bastien und Bastienne, will be performed twice today at Emmanuel Church in Boston.

Chung recently met with music figures from North Korea and members of the North Korean State Symphony Orchestra, all of whom were in favor. Chung saw no signs of resistance from the South Korean government, which makes him hopeful about the future of the project. The project has moved into secondary negotiations between the two halves of the peninsula.

I was briefly in South Korea this past January, not long after 50 were killed in attacks between the two countries, and the animosity between them is still quite evident. It is unrealistic to believe that a move such as this can resolve the tensions that have been built over the better part of a century, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction. Chung indicated that he doubts the collaboration could have serious potential for changing the cultural policies of North Korea, but it could be a valuable interchange nonetheless.

The cultural rift between North and South Korea has widened ever since their division in 1945. The cultural state of North Korea does indeed seem to be more dire; all “art,” under the eye of the government, must have an underlying didactic purpose, and cultural influences from outside the nation are widely criticized and rejected. In fact, on the few occasions when the North Korean regime has admitted external cultural groups, it is viewed internally as proof that the rest of the world respects North Korea.

This is a reassuring bit of news, particularly with the recent controversy around the BBC Proms. The Israel Philharmonic was performing a broadcast concert on September 1st which had to be shut down when 20 to 30 anti-Israel protesters began shouting and singing. They were booed by audience members and eventually removed by security, but the disturbance they produced was widely felt.

See also:

Maestro plans joint concert with NK, by Kwon Mee-yoo via The Korea Times

Protests disrupt Proms concert by Israel Philharmonic, via BBC News

The violin, known as the “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius, was made in 1721 and is one of the two best-preserved instruments by 18^th century luthier Antonio Stradivari. Because the winner of the auction has chosen to remain anonymous, it is uncertain whether the violin’s new home will be in a museum or the hands of a player. While such an artifact would be a worthy addition to a museum’s collection, it would be quite a shame for such an incredible instrument to gather dust.


The Lady Blunt was donated by the not-for-profit Nippon Music Foundation, an organization which lends instruments from its collection of Stradivari violins to both renowned professional musicians and promising young musicians. The auction was run by Tarisio, a 3rd-party rare instrument auction website.

Nippon Music Foundation’s President, Kazuko Shiomi, acknowledged that the Lady Blunt was an important part of the Foundation’s collection, but that “the needs of our fellow Japanese people after the March 11 tragedy have proven that we all need to help… The donation will be put to immediate use.”

Read more: The ‘Lady Blunt’ Stradivarius of 1721 via Tarisio Blog

Earlier this month, a concert in San Francisco was disrupted when an elderly couple began shouting and sarcastically clapping during a “modern” work for viola in order to bring the performance to an end. The performer, JHNO (who claims to have been invited specifically to fulfill a “subversive” role, adding an experimental element to the evening), did in fact end his piece prematurely, smashing his viola and storming offstage. Elderly violist Bernard Zaslav, formerly of the Fine Arts Quartet, claimed retrospectively that a faulty hearing aid simply made the performance unbearably painful, however his shouts of “I’m a real violist and this isn’t music!” and “Bravo!” certainly don’t help his case.

While the event in San Francisco didn’t escalate into a full riot, the incident, together with the anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s birth yesterday, allows us a chance to reflect on musical riots of the past. The first such upset that I learned of occurred during a performance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs in 1973 under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. The piece is twenty-five minutes of a single chord, first punctuated and then drawn out. The 1973 concert received shouts and catcalls from the Carnegie Hall audience, and one woman famously beat the stage with her head (or her shoe, depending on which version you hear). Interestingly, the piece had been fairly well received at its premier three years prior, and though subsequent performances received a mix of applause and boos, nothing prepared Reich for the hostility he received at Carnegie Hall.

Looking back, perhaps no musical riot has escalated quite as much as what followed a performance of Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici. The work itself is notable for being the first French grand opera, as well as for introducing influential concepts such as mime to the world of opera. Similar to Reich’s work, the biggest fuss was not at the premiere performance (which occurred in early 1828), but rather in 1830 when the politically-charged opera was performed in Brussels. That performance sparked the riots that lead to Belgium’s revolution for independence.

Still, the most famous music riot is undoubtedly the one which followed the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in early 20^th-century Paris. The combination of Stravinsky’s score—barbaric, primitive, complex, and decidedly genius—and Nijinsky’s sensual choreography sent the crowd into an uproar. The piece had hardly started when the audience was already shouting and whistling; this further devolved into arguments and fistfights in the aisles of the Theatre de Champs-Elysees. Saint-Saens himself is said to have stormed out of the theatre, infuriated at the misuse of the bassoon in the opening measures of the work. The Paris police arrived at intermission, but even they were unable to maintain order in the midst of rabid concert-goers. Stravinsky ran backstage to help Nijisnky lead the dancers, who were unable to hear the orchestra. Diaghilev, the famous arts patron who arranged for the commission of the work, flashed the lights of the theatre to try to bring order, but to no avail. Stravinsky was forced to flee the theatre.

Coincidentally, following the viola debacle in San Francisco, Mr. Zaslov was asked if he would also have shouted down The Rite of Spring to which he responded “But that was real music!” Many have speculated that audiences have become desensitized to composers and artists trying to shock them into awe or disgust. They feel that riots will soon become fossils—mere remnants of the past. Perhaps too, the rift between “traditionalists” and “modernists” in the classical music world has grown so wide that we are never forced to confront the uncertain. That the Beethoven crowd and the Berg crowd are never forced to share a stage. This effect, this sanitizing of the music worlds, is ultimately neither positive or negative, but simply a fact however sour or grim. As we look forward, the question of aesthetics seems to fade as the delineation between music and noise becomes confused into oblivion.

See also:

ViolaGate! by Brian M. Rosen via Music vs. Theatre

List of Classical Music Riots on Wikipedia

It's really hard to find truly good scores and recordings of the Goldbergs that are just free; free to download, listen to, perform, share, arrange, or mash up. And almost none of them are gratis.

The Open Goldberg Project is solving this problem, at least in the case of the Goldberg Variations, while exploring the intersection between open source software, public domain, crowd sourced funding, and emergent web technologies for music. The primary goal of the project is to create a new edition of the score of the Goldbergs, as well as a new studio recording, played on the piano by Kimiko Ishizaka. Both the score and the recording will use the Creative Commons Zero tool to place them into the public domain, assuring that they'll both be free (gratis and libre) forevermore.


IMSLP under attack: Copyright Information via the IMSLP Forums

Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note, by Daniel Wakin via The New York Times