Bargain Scores

Thanks to the war and the loopholes in copyright laws, fancy prices for imported symphonic scores have gone down as much as 50%. Hampton Publications, Inc., a new Manhattan firm, last week had a rush of orders. Hampton had put on the market its first batch of scores, European editions which had simply been photographed and printed by photo-offset.

The process sounds like copyright piracy but is not. It is illegal to reprint someone else's copyrighted edition of a book, or to sell an unauthorized recording of a broadcast, or to broadcast news from a newspaper while the paper is being sold.

But it is permissible to reproduce (and perform) a musical score provided it is in the public domain, i.e., not protected by copyright.

Hampton's reprints are all in the public domain. Because Russia, like the U.S., is not a member of the Berne copyright convention, and has no copyright treaty with the U.S., Soviet Composer Serge Prokofieff is on the Hampton list. Hampton sells his Classical Symphony for $17.25. Rumanian Georges Enesco's early works were for some reason never copyrighted; Hampton sells his Rumanian Rhapsody No. 1 for $20 (the European edition costs $88.50).

Before the war, the great European publishing houses, mostly German, enjoyed a monopoly in symphonic music. U.S. publishers sold German scores for a commission, maintained other profitable contacts with the Germans, never thought it wise to compete with them. But today imports have ceased, and German publishers' plates have had to be melted down for war metal.

The German publishers may still not be entirely out of the running. Last week one of their Manhattan agents, Associated Music Publishers, rushed out a new score, a photo-offset reprint of a Breitkopf & Haertel edition (Mozart's Magic Flute overture), selling for $8.50 and labeled "the only authorized American reprint." A.M.P. vowed to beat Hampton prices all along the line, at a loss if necessary.

The profits, if any, could only be credited to frozen German accounts--but the Germans were still in the game.

Just as his bustling Concerto Grosso was about to be heard for the first time--in Vienna--the Nazis arrived. Then the same thing happened in Prague; then in Paris. Last week, at last, Bohuslav Martinu, Czech modernist composer, heard the much-applauded premiere of his concerto, played by Serge Koussevitzky and his Symphony--in Boston, before the Nazis arrived.

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