Scores from the book - Historical Anthology of Music

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homerdundas
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Scores from the book - Historical Anthology of Music

Post by homerdundas »

Historical Anthology of Music
ISBN 0-674-39301-5
author / editors:
Davidson, Archibald T. and Apel, Willi
copyright 1950, Harvard University Press
(renewal is claimed for USA, 1977)

I would assume that the works in this volume are 'unedited' i.e. 'urtext' and that these might be available for the IMSLP-EU server.
This work is available in snippets on Google books, and seems to be in most university libraries for further perusal.
Thanks.
pml
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Re: Scores from the book - Historical Anthology of Music

Post by pml »

Homer,

they might be urtext, but they are not unedited – virtually the entire corpus of items represented before ca.1600 (i.e. almost all of volume 1 and a little bit of volume 2) is in black or white mensural notation, or from neumatic representation (and there might even be some examples of more obscure notation, if I recall correctly), all of which has been editorially transcribed into modern notation. I believe the only thing about HAM that is (or was) copyrightable, however, is the editorial contribution of Davidson (†1961) and Apel (†1988), in creating those transcriptions – and the US renewal would indicate the only possibility is if Canadian copyright law doesn’t confer the same duration of protection as the US.

If the editorial contribution merits the “life+50 years p.m.a.” protections then Apel’s dates push the Canadian copyright out to end-2038, as opposed to the US’ end-2045. The original music represented by their editions is of course public domain, but the edition doesn’t represent the works in their original form; it’s more akin to the realisation of a continuo part in terms of the somewhat narrow notational choices that are available to the transcriber, and whether these comprise any “originality” in their own right. Hope this helps.

Regards, Philip
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PML (talk)
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