Talk:Early music
From Academic Kids
Early Music says:
- (except that protected by a statutory perpetual copyright in one or more Berne Convention signatories
I've never ever heard of such a thing as a 'statutory perpetual copyright'... -- SJK
Some countries' laws (but not the US; see US Const. 1.8.8) provide for a perpetual copyright on specific works. For instance, the UK has one on Peter Pan works by Barrie. See also the following:
- Wikipedia article public domain
- Bono Act on E2 (http://everything2.com/?node=sonny+bono+copyright+extension+act)
- Google search for |"peter pan" "perpetual copyright"| (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22peter+pan%22+%22perpetual+copyright%22)
Early music is in the public domain, but OTOH, early music notation is very different from modern music notation. (Heck, just putting it that way is a little deceptive; there is no single early music notation.) Early music notation doesn't indicate dynamics or articulation, and even omits some accidentals (the so-called "musica ficta") much like vowels in Semitic languages. (The notion is that "everybody knows" that if you don't apply the accidental, a dissonance results, so why write it in?) Early music notation time signatures, where they even exist, are quite different--the same note shape is used for the subdivision of the beat ("prolation") whether it's duple or triple, which will certainly throw off modern notation readers. A modern edition of an early music piece thus requires significant knowledge and editorial judgment, and such editions typically are copyrighted. (That's not to say that someone working from the original manuscripts or fascimiles thereof can't make a public domain or copylefted edition in modern notation, just that just because the original is PD, derived works aren't necessarily PD.)
Does Lilypond support the more common of the old notations? In that case, would it be possible to write a program that uses heuristic methods to convert the old notations to the less-ambiguous modern notation? --Damian Yerrick
Notation and performance
This sentence seems untrue or at least inaccurate:
- "Early music notation is, by current standards, very sketchy."
As the article explains:
- "Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score."
Early music musicians, composers, and transcribers had a "contract" just as we do today, with contemporary musicians being trained with the knowledge necessary to interpret contemporary notation. Hyacinth 07:16, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- Furthermore, the term "dyadic counterpoint" is a strange term and doesn't really relate to the rest of the paragraph. How about a reference to Musica ficta and notes inegales instead? Wahoofive 00:43, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Eras in music history
The sidebar on "eras in music history" shows the "early music" era as 1500-1750. Surely that's not what you mean. Early music starts more like 1100.
- That is Template:European art music eras. Hyacinth 01:12, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
