one third of one percent ....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Benjamin is intense, passionate and utterly serious. When we meet he is in some despair over a statistic related to him by his publisher concerning the Performing Rights Society. "The PRS is responsible for collecting all the royalties for all types of music in Britain, and the royalties involved are immense, something like £600m a year. And, apparently, the whole of classical music within copyright – so from Strauss and Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Britten, through till today – is responsible for only one third of 1% of those sums."

from here

a very interesting interview from many perspectives but i think this one has great relevance for what we are trying to say about R3 ...figures like these can feed the access argument very strongly and RW has a case for the approach on the numbers

to my mind he has no argument on the substance because i think he is trying to kid people that serious music is popular music ... it isn't that is not to say that it does not need a shameless confident propaganda campaign to argue for what it is .... not a pretence that it is all lollipop

[Serial_Apologist]

from here

a very interesting interview from many perspectives but i think this one has great relevance for what we are trying to say about R3 ...figures like these can feed the access argument very strongly and RW has a case for the approach on the numbers

to my mind he has no argument on the substance because i think he is trying to kid people that serious music is popular music ... it isn't that is not to say that it does not need a shameless confident propaganda campaign to argue for what it is .... not a pretence that it is all lollipop

While the vast bulk of scores seen as belonging to the classical performance arena predate copyright, recordings are covered. Well, so I understand.

Depressing to see Benjamin's plug for Schoenberg dissed in the replies below the article. Atonality takes one into a zone from which new perspectives are revealed on what is widely (inaccurately) referred to as "tonal" music, in a manner analogous to those astronauts' first views of Earth from afar. Most music outside the Euroclassical tradition between approximately 1600 and 1910 is better described as modal, if one is thinking in harmonic terms... and that opens another Pandora's box! But listeners will come around - I have that on the evidence of people whom I have introduced to the musics of, not just Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, or even Boulez, Berio and Benjamin, but of one frequent poster who was very complimentary about the very Schoenbergianly atonal and 12-tone music of Nikos Skalkottas a couple of weeks ago.

As in the case of jazz, modern, "post-tonal" music, (if you will), offers many more entry points than what, through contrived media neglect, may appear Tardis-like in scale and accessibility from the outside.