We could be looking at thousands of dollars

Yes, that is Glenn Gould. But this path starts with another musician. Steve Reich’s Come Out is an electronic composition created from the voice of an African-American youth. No conventional instruments or musical notation are used in the pioneering work. But if I want to broadcast/webcastCome Out there is no problem. Future Radio is party to a performing rights agreement which directs royalty payments to the composers and publishers of music works. Despite not being a conventional music work Come Out is covered by that agreement. So far so good: Come out is broadcast, the listener has access to a seminal 20th century work and the copyright owner is rewarded.

Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy is a series of three radio documentaries made for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) between 1967 and 1977. Two of the documentaries use short music excerpts but, like Come Out which dates from the same period, they are voice compositions. But, despite using speech as his raw material, Glenn Gould always considered his contrapuntal radio experiments to be music. He wrote about them in an article titled ‘Radio as Music’, spoke of his scripts as ‘scores’ and even referred to the documentaries with opus numbers.

The Solitude Trilogy and other Glenn Gould documentaries are the stuff of legend. But they are rarely heard. So I decided to remedy that with a series of broadcasts/webcasts for Future Radio. As ever the station management were up for the project and I own the commercially released CDs of the programmes from CBC Records. So it all seemed simple, until …

The CBC Records 5 CD set Glenn Gould – the Radio Artist can be bought in any good record store alongside Steve Reich’s Come Out. But the CBC Records CD packaging carries these words:

This recording may not be reproduced in any form, nor may it be used for commercial or broadcast purposes.

To understand what this means I contacted CBC in Toronto and received the following response from their manager, international sales and awards:

We appreciate your interest in the Glenn Gould documentaries. I have been able to confirm the status of the commercial disc for you. The audio disc is for non-broadcast purposes only.

And as much as we’d like to accommodate your request both the recordings and the underlying music publishing rights would have to be cleared. I’m told the we could be looking at potentially thousands of dollars for music clearance costs. Unfortunately, the situation is further complicated as all decisions involve the Glenn Gould Estate, as well.

The same revenue considerations apply for the Petula Clark program. Sorry to disappoint.

I am not an expert on music copyright but I do have a resonable working knowledge of the subject. My interpretation, which has been broadly confirmed by PRS for Music’s helpful press office, is the following. Despite being sold as commercial disc the disclaimer on the CBC set excludes them from the usual performing rights agreements. This allows the copyright owners, presumably CBC and the Glenn Gould Estate, to set their own royalty level for each broadcast of the discs, in this case “potentially thousands of dollars”. As Future Radio is a not for profit community station it is easy to understand what that means for my (and many other) proposed broadcasts.

Glenn Gould’s biographer Kevin Bazzana quotes the Canadian composer Istvn Anhalt as saying that:

Speech compositions [by Schoenberg, Milhaud, Berio, Kagel, Ligeti, Lutoslawski and others are] are one of the significant developments in the recent history of Western music.

Both Steve Reich’s Come Out and Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy are part of that significant development. But their radically different status for broadcast purposes, a status determined solely by the copyright owners of the respective recordings, raises important questions, particularly in the light of recent extensions of copyright protection for recorded music.

I have already written about the future custody of historic recordings as highlighted by EMI’s current problems. In the past discussions of music copyright have made two important assumptions. First, that ownership of the copyright will remain with the work’s creator and thereafter with someone sympathetic to the creator’s aims, and secondly that the owner will grant reasonable access to the work. But in today’s volatile market both assumptions are questionable. This puts at risk access to some important parts of our cultural heritage which listing the physical fabric of Abbey Road Studios is not going to solve.

As ever today, litigation is not far away. More contrapuntal copyright here.

The views expressed in this article are mine alone and do not reflect those of Future Radio. All CDs and books mentioned in the article were bought at retail price. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as “fair use”, for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to – overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot ukTechnorati Tags : comeglennmusicgouldradiodocumentariesworkfuture radioconventionalbroadcastfuture

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