Recommended Reading

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’ve just been reading a great article by William Lockhart, ‘Trial by ear: legal attitudes to keyboard arrangement in nineteenth century Britain’, Music & Letters 93.2 (2012), 191-221. It’s on JSTOR:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41684166

Now, it’s not about legal deposit per se, although it is mentioned. (If I were to make one minor point, it’s to clarify that when the author states that items were ‘physically deposited’ at Stationers’ Hall, this implies that the Hall was, itself, a legal deposit repository, but this was not so. Stationers’ Hall registered publications, then passed on the legal deposit copies to the libraries – if they weren’t directly sent from the publishers themselves.)

The article is, in fact, an excellent analysis of three British music copyright cases. Considering how prevalent musical arrangements were, it is no surprise that there was litigation concerning copyright from time to time. Legal arguments examined various factors. No-one disputed the importance of the melody, but as we all know, there is more to a composition than that, and as for a series of opera tunes rearranged into a different order for dancing to? Well, you’ll have to read it!

It was interesting to find names that I have often encountered in other capacities, and particularly fun to meet my friend the quadrille arranger, Philippe Musard, again. (I looked at some of his quadrilles while reconstructing the contents of the University of St Andrews’ most popular copyright music volume, vol.284, now missing.)

Even if I don’t rush off to follow up all Lockhart’s references, there are a dozen or so that I shall be adding to our bibliography. There’s a lot there, excellent for providing context to our own research:-

  • What music the Victorians enjoyed
  • The development of legal definitions around the process and art of musical arrangement
  • How musicians perceived arrangements
  • Evidence that the records of music registration were actually referred to in cases of litigation!

When I get the chance to open my laptop, I will get these references into Mendeley and then into the bibliography. For now, with a tablet on a crowded Virgin train, I have to concede temporary defeat!