Elsewhere

Kyle Gann has announced Women Composers' Month on Postclassic Radio. I'm listening now to Maggie Payne's hauntingly folkish Aeolian Confluence. Composer Corey Dargel has started up a funny-informative new podcast called Composers and the People Who Love Them (with a team of satirical experts in the Gerard Hoffnung / Glenn Gould tradition). The inaugural episode features Eve Beglarian. Bernard Sherman has written an excellent wrap-up of the Lionel Sawkins controversy for Andante. The same site has an essay by ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman, who points out that copyrighting a Baroque motet is not unlike copyrighting a folk song. Once a work has passed into the public domain, it should stay there, or the concept of copyright devolves into nonsense. See, for example, the Berlin Sing-Akadamie's so far successful attempt to claim ownership of Vivaldi's opera Motezuma on the grounds that the score was discovered in the Sing-Akademie's archives. I also recommend this properly angry post by Greg Sandow on pop-culture ignorance in the classical world. It never ceases to amaze me that classical musicians complain about how mainstream culture neglects them, and, in the next breath, display total cluelessness about that culture.