Re: Guide to Writing Orchestral Scores with Lilypond?????

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 09:15:42PM +0100, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 01/10/2013 12:09 AM, Urs Liska wrote:
> >It was already discussed on this list: It was a silly idea to use copyrighted
> >material at all for this tutorial. It was just something I was working on at
> >that time, and I didn't really think about it ...
> 
> To be honest, I disagree.  This is something that a standalone
> project can reasonably do which the main project can't, and it's
> useful, because it shows how to solve real, complicated notational
> problems in Lilypond.

Unless you are planning this as a protest, I doubt that
deliberately setting out to infringe on copyright is a great
strategy.  Are you really equipped to deal with a lawsuit from
music publishers -- especially since there's now a public record
of your awareness that you intend to break the law?

> Contemporary music, which is almost all in
> copyright, generally presents the most complex notational problems
> to solve, and made-up examples don't cut it because there's no
> professionally-engraved example to compare them to.

I have never looked at Trevor Baca's or Mike Solomon's scores and
thought "gee, that looks somewhat nice, but I really can't praise
it more because I don't have an existing score to compare it to."
Their work is *absolutely beautiful* by itself.

I find it astounding that a group of composers keep on suggesting
that it's impossible to either create nice examples or use
material from their own scores.  It isn't precisely hard to find
beautiful material in Mike's work, and most of them are already
available in pdf form!  I can't remember off-hand if the ly source
is available, nor whether it's under copyleft, but if not then he
would almost certainly be willing to license a few bars under a
permissive license.

> Personally I think that I small library of _real_ contemporary
> musical examples, compared to the published score, would be an
> extremely useful resource for Lilypond.  It shouldn't be difficult
> to secure publishers' permission for short extracts.

If you truly want to spend a few hours writing letters to
publishers, I would be interested to hear the results.

> >But I just reviewed my communication with UE and noticed that I (and them) 
> >only
> >talked about the 'measures' of the music, not about which rendering of them
> >(i.e. a scan of the UE edition or my new typesetting). They allowed me 'to 
> >show
> >these music examples on my homepage' - any other use wasn't allowed.
> >Which I think means that I can also put the original edition into it.
> 
> In any case, your use of these few measures probably comes under
> "fair use" exemptions for educational/teaching purposes, etc.

No.  "Fair use" would apply in *some* (not all) countries only if
this was a treatise about that particular composer's style.  One
of the "smell tests" is whether the educational goal could be
achieved *without* using copywritten material -- which is
certainly could be.

- Graham