RE: Fwd: hanashir digest

[Adrian Adam Durlester <aad...>]

Yes, Neil, this would make a great discussion at CAJE. Count me in.

I think you summarized the situation quite nicely in this post.

Adrian



-----Original Message-----
From:   Cantor Neil & Katie Schwartz [SMTP:schwartz (at) enter(dot)net]
Sent:   Friday, June 20, 1997 3:14 AM
To:     NeilNFW (at) aol(dot)com
Cc:     hanashir (at) shamash(dot)org
Subject:        Re: Fwd: hanashir digest


>Without this type of word of mouth help and someone who was nice
>enough to compile all of these for-profit contraband songs into
>the easily accessible NFTY Chordsters, I would still be teaching
>Zum Gali Gali (and only Zum Gali Gali).

It's nice to know that someone even remembers that old "warhorse".
But seriously, two comments on the NFTY Chordster:

   Knowing the UAHC, I can't imagine that they publish(ed) that book
   without clearing at least permissions from most of the composers.

   If they did publish without permission, I can only think how much
   things have changed in the 20 years since that was done:  the NFTY
   songs were written by people who were primarily fairly young at the
   time, and few people were at the point in their lives where they
   were trying to make a living by composing Jewish music.  The whole
   world has changed a lot since then, and Jewish music reflects both
   the good changes and the bad, including copyright issues (I'll let
   the reader decide which side those issues fall in).

>I have a definite problem for being scolded for asking for chords to
>unpublished works (which many of the Debbie Fridman's songs are),
>works that are presumably in the public domain, such as the Orthodox
>melody to Shalom Aleichem-- even after asking the artist if it was OK
>to teach.

I'll try not to scold if you'll try not to "vent".  Personally, I don't
compose, and if I did I would probably be happy to give away my music
for free to anyone who wanted it just to get it heard and sung.  However,
I have a steady job, and don't depend on royalties to pay my rent.  When
my wife wrote a professional book (Speech Pathology), I saw how much work
went into it, and it's nice that she gets a few dollars of royalties now
and then to recompense her for the hundreds of hours she spent writing.

What Debbie Friedman songs are totally unpublished?  She has such a huge
number of songs out, it's hard to imagine that there's even more that we
have never seen or heard.  BTW, the Shalom Aleichem has a composer also,
Rabbi Israel Goldfarb, but he's not around anymore to complain.

>An example is Debbie Winston's O Guide My Steps, taught at Hava Nashira.
>If someone has the chord structure to this song, it would save me immense
>>stress, frustration, and broken tapes and tape players.  It is not easy
>to lift this music off of vocal recordings and I want to teach these
>songs in six weeks at camp.

I don't know Debbie Winston yet, but it may be possible to find her and
ask if she has written out the music (to save you that excruciatingly
frustrating process).  If she is like a few of my friends who compose,
she will probably ask you to reimburse her a couple dollars for postage
and the time it takes to pull a copy off her computer, if she wrote it
using Finale or Encore.  She might be thrilled that you like her music,
and send it to you for free.  The point is, she composed it, so she
should have a say in how (and to whom) it gets distributed so that she
will feel encouraged to compose more songs in the future.  If enough
people like her music, maybe Transcontinental will publish it for her,
and then we should pay them for our copies so that they keep publishing.

>Is it not appropriate to bring these songs to our classrooms and
>congregations?  Or should we simply purchase the tapes and CD's and
>play them instead of an opening hymn on Friday nights.  Is this what
>we have come to?  Hiding the music because of possible copyright
>infringement?  It's not drugs. It's not guns.  It's not the secret
>ingredient to Coca-Cola.  It's music, and it's what we do.
>
>Perhaps we should all simply add a line "used by permission" and sing
>it in full harmony at the end of every song we teach.
>
>Pardon my venting, I just want to spread the music.

Obviously, we all want to "bring these songs to our classrooms and
congregations", or we wouldn't be sitting at our computers in the
middle of the night discussing this.  We should all give ourselves
some credit for even caring enough about Jewish music to spend the
time arguing about how to spread it in a fair and responsible way.

You are right - it's not the nuclear launch codes we're discussing.
The main issue is simply fairness to the composers, some of whom do
rely on royalty payments for their rent, so that they will continue
to compose new Jewish music in the 21st century.  To use your first
example:

        If composers get bummed out and feel that there is no point
in making new music since no one will reimburse them for their time
and creativity, then Jeff Klepper's "Lo Alecha" and Debbie Friedman's
"Mi Sheberach" will become the new "Zum Gali Gali"s of the future,
frozen in time and eventually becoming passe' with nothing to update
them.  It happened to Israeli music:  very few singable songs still
come from Israel, so some of us still teach "Erev Shel Shoshanim"
because there is nothing to replace it.  The Chassidic Song Festivals
ran their course and produced lots of new songs which have endured,
but now that genre is also getting exhausted and few new popular songs
are composed which we can call "neo-Chassidic".

Will this also happen to our "American Jewish popular music" genre as
Jeff K. and Debbie F. and Robbie Solomon all move through their 40's,
or will there continue to be new composers who feel that it is worth
their time and effort to continue writing this type of music?  Will we
continue to encourage our "veterans" to write new songs in the 21st
century, or are we content to just recycle their existing repertoire?

The answer is in the hands of every songleader who has to make a daily
ethical choice about how to spread this music.  We all agree that we
want to share it with anyone who cares enough to learn it - without
that, this conversation really is "moot".

As someone else said today, if we can afford the computers that we are
using to communicate, we can probably afford to pay for the music we
teach.  My old Mac cost me about 100 times as much as my most expensive
songbook ($2500 versus $25 for Tara's International Jewish Songbook),
and since I use them to teach, the songbooks are all deductable.

While the anonymity of cyberspace seems to encourage us to share (or
vent) our feelings on this subject, does anyone who is attending the
CAJE Conference and/or Music Pre-Conference have the courage to argue
about this face-to-face at Stanford in August?  At the very least, we
will get to meet the people behind the names we see on our screens.

                                                 Shabbat Shalom,

                                                 Cantor Neil Schwartz



Cantor Neil Schwartz
or
Katie Schwartz, B.S.I.

schwartz (at) enter(dot)net


Adrian A. Durlester      durleste (at) plains(dot)nodak(dot)edu
Production Manager, Festival Concert Hall, North Dakota State University
Director of Music and Religious Education, Temple Beth El, Fargo, North Dakota
Alternate e-mail: durleste (at) compuserve(dot)com   adriand (at) aol(dot)com