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An ethnomusicologist considers the Sawkins v. Hyperion case. With the Sawkins v. Hyperion case, the classical music world has discovered a fact about copyright law that has long bothered folklorists and ethnomusicologists: under certain circumstances, the law allows individuals, in effect, to "privatize" works that are common property. Anonymous works handed down via oral tradition — the sort that make up the musical heritage of many small-scale societies — have always been vulnerable to legal appropriation. For a recent (and relatively benign) example, consider the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek's "Pygmy Lullaby" (from the 1996 recording "Visible World"). The title notwithstanding,...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A small part of a newly identified choral work by baroque Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi was played for the first time in about 250 years on Tuesday after being uncovered by an Australian academic. Janice Stockigt of the University of Melbourne said the 11-movement "Dixit Dominus" for choir and soloists, which she uncovered in Dresden this year, would be played in full in the German city next year. Stockigt said the work had previously been attributed to Baldassarre Galuppi, a Venetian contemporary of Vivaldi, since it first appeared in Galuppi's name in Dresden's Catholic Court Church in...

Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan The composer was certainly a genius, but he diverted music from elegant universality into tortured self-obsessionDylan Evans Tuesday June 7, 2005 Guardian It's Beethoven week on the BBC. By midnight on Friday Radio 3 will have filled six days of airtime with every single note the composer wrote - every symphony, every quartet, every sonata and lots more besides. This coincides with a series of three films on BBC2 in which the conductor Charles Hazlewood tells us about the composer's life, and three programmes of musical analysis on BBC4. It's good to see classical music...

Like Rodney Dangerfield, the humanities in Washington "don't get no respect." Not as much as they should, anyway. We're a company town and the company makes politics. But like a blind squirrel who finds an acorn once in a while, politicians and the journalists gather occasionally with others who crave more profundity than the noise in political rhetoric to listen to the annual >Jefferson Lecture. "The training of the intellect was meant to produce an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction but it also had practical goals of importance to the individual and the entire community, to make the humanistically trained individuals...

American political conservatives enjoy an uneasy relationship with high culture. There are, of course, those who define their conservatism precisely in terms of high culture - of the preservation and transmission from past to future generations of "the best that has been thought and written." But economic and religious conservatives might wonder what's in it for them. For it is far from obvious that the canonical works of literature, music and visual art are much help, on the whole, when it comes to defending the free market or the altar and hearth. It would be one thing if the canon...

The Old Master By James Bartel With his first wife Maria Barbara, his soulmate as history tells us, Sebastian Bach fathered seven children. The first child was a daughter, Catharina. A pair of twins died within days. The final son died within a year. Months later, Maria Barbara succumbed to disease. Bach was then 35 and engaged in the full awakening of his genius. His workload was Herculean and mounting, and now there were five children at home without a mother, the oldest being 12. Staggered by grief, Bach shouldered on. Hear the Old Master speak: "I was obliged to...

Imagine Plato, a noted fan of ancient Greek athletics, providing color commentary for the upcoming Olympic Games: "Why in Zeus' name are they wearing clothes?" he might ask. The Olympics are returning to their original home in Greece next month but not to their original dress code. "This may be the most obvious and striking difference between today's athletes and the ancient Greeks," UC Berkeley archaeologist Stephen Miller says in "Ancient Greek Athletics," his new book on the ancient games. So embedded was competing in the nude that our word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnos for "naked," Miller notes...

I've had to open the Oval Office doors more frequently for a bad performance on television than for somebody whose temper flared enough to cause for such summons, since the doors to the Oval Office, and the term itself, debuted February 22 at Rockingham, NC. (And Francis Ferko should . . . I can't say it. He homewrecked two cities and a whole state to please himself.) But now the Oval Office doors are opening wide again for a looney show on the WB called "Superstar USA". "Auditions for The WB's Superstar USA were held in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Orlando...

How do you write the "political history" of a piece of music? The idea isn't as farfetched as you might think. Music professor Esteban Buch did just that in his book BEETHOVEN'S NINTH: A POLITICAL HISTORY. And it's an intriguing, thought-provoking history. Beethoven's magnificent setting of the ODE TO JOY (the tune to the hymn, "Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee") appeals to people everywhere -- and it seems to mean something different to each one. One could argue that people love the symphony simply because of the lyrics that celebrate universal brotherhood, the beauty and emotion of the music, and...

If music is the universal language, then the message emanating from a Steinway concert grand piano at a concert today in Baghdad, Iraq, was one of friendship and support. The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra performed its first concert today at the Baghdad Convention Center since its new grand piano arrived last month. Steinway & Sons offered to donate the piano after the orchestra performed here with the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. Steinway responded to a National Endowment for the Arts plea for companies to donate instruments to the Iraqi orchestra, which floundered under Saddam Hussein. Once the donation was made,...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Forget the movie, Cecilia Bartoli says. Antonio Salieri isn't the bad guy who poisoned Mozart. He's an underappreciated genius who paved the path for Beethoven. Following hit recordings of works by Vivaldi and Gluck, Bartoli is touring the United States to support her latest project, "The Salieri Album," which contains 13 arias from the seldom-heard composer. Some of the pieces were so obscure that they had to be found in a Vienna library -- only two of the arias had ever been recorded.

You may wish to jot this in your diaries and upbraid me with it in twelve months' time but I am about to make the rock-solid prediction that the year 2004 will be the last for the classical record industry. The unravelling has run faster than prestissimo. Major labels which, a decade ago, pumped out 120 new releases a year are now reduced to a trickle of two dozen. Epochal concerts are no longer recorded for posterity. Classical stars have lost their license to twinkle. Where labels once fought bidding wars over shimmering talent they now compete in shedding it....

If I am to believe the media, President George W. Bush’s policies have engineered a complete economic meltdown and put us in the worst fiscal condition since the great depression. When I hear this I typically ignore it. As an economics major, I know how to read through nonsense. Recently, however, it has come to my attention that many economists themselves have entered into this silliness. Recently, the think tank EPI circled a petition opposing the Bush tax cut that was signed by over 500 economists, including several Nobel laureates. What struck me as odd was not that some of...

What are your most perfect albums? By perfect albums, I mean albums where you don't have to skip over a weak track. Collections and Best of packages do not count. Some of mine: (in no particular order) 1. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds 2. The Beatles - Revolver 3. Miles Davis - On the Corner 4. The Clash - London Calling 5. Willie Dixon - I Am the Blues 6. Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison 7. Black Flag - Damaged 8. John Coltrane - Love Supreme 9. The Who - The Who Sell Out 10. Duke Ellington &...

A bus station in America is planning to play classical music and smooth jazz to discourage loitering teenagers. Officials at the Trade Street in Charlotte, North Carolina, hope the "grow-up" music will irritate groups of youths who hang around the station. The station's loudspeakers already emit the calls of hawks and owls to frighten away pigeons that roost in the rafters. "The idea is to make the atmosphere at the Trade Street station less pleasant for those who aren't there to catch a bus," a spokeswoman told the Charlotte Observer. "We know if we play a certain genre, people won't...

Michael Jackson says he doesn't like pop and would much rather listen to classical music. He was asked why he had bought two classical rather than pop CDs whilst out shopping in Berlin last week. Jackson, the self-styled King of Pop, told German magazine Bunte: "I don't like pop music." The singer, whose album Thriller remains the world's biggest-seller, was in Berlin to receive the Millennium Bambi award in recognition of his status as the world's "greatest living pop icon". Jackson, who went shopping for the CDs without his usual bodyguards, said: "I'd like to go shopping for CDs in...

Progressive Dispensationalism Some Observations -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Its Leaders 1) Craig Blaising, a former Dallas Seminary Professor who is now teaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY (a Southern Baptist school which is non-dispensational); 2) Darrell Bock, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Seminary; 3) Robert Saucy, who taught at Talbot School of Theology (Talbot Seminary). Due to the pioneering work of these men and others, many others have entered the progressive fold. 2. Its Books 1) Dispensationalism, Israel and the Church by Blaising and Bock (1992); 2) The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism by Saucy (1993); 3) Progressive Dispensationalism...