User talk:Dliao

UserPage
David Liao's contact information and basic information are on his userpage User:Dliao. David's commercial visual arts website is at www.davidliao.com.

TalkPage
Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place  after the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! Mak (talk)  03:20, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help pages
 * Tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

I would like to post to Wikimedia and Wikipedia a Baroque aria "Per la gloria d'adorarvi," by Bononcini. The issue is the copyright surrounding the piano realization.

The pianist and I looked at the voice lines and piano realizations in 26 Italian Songs and Arias -- Medium Low Voice, John Glenn Paton ed., Alfred Publishing, Van Nuys, CA: 1991. To understand why I wonder whether our audio file escapes the legal mess surrounding the copyright of derivative works, the reader must understand the scholarly movement that surrounds modern anthologies of Baroque songs. Baroque composers often sketched arias in a voice line with loose figured bass. The scores constituting Hal Leonard's 24 Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries are in large part nineteenth-century realizations including mistaken notes and filled with anachronistic romantic-period biases; the scores were also the staple of voice classrooms for much of the twentieth century. In the 1990s a series of student voice anthologies appeared, including the 26 Italian Songs and Arias, based on expert consultation with original manuscripts in Italian archives. The majority of the creative content distinguishing 26 Italian Songs from 24 Italian Songs was academic historical research: a description of how Baroque singers and harpsichordists might have realized the arias. In some passages, Paton writes two vocal lines to suggest ornaments. Our recording omits Paton's ornaments for this aria and adds ornaments and rhythmic variations of our own design in both voice and piano staves.

Neither Paton nor we are entitled to claim copyright to the underlying idea that a historical performance of this aria would have had ornaments similar to those Paton wrote or to those we performed. Paton is, however, allowed to exercise copyright over his expressing this scholastic thesis by giving the two examples of the voice line and the single example of the keyboard realization in his anthology, and we are allowed to exercise copyright over our alternative example that chooses one of his voice lines in some places and substitutes a line of our own creation in others. Publishers have claimed copyright for manuscripts differing substantially less from existing sheet music than our arrangement differs from either of Paton's suggestions. One can purchase "cheap" editions of classical sheet music that include a few wrong notes. This is analogous to submitting as one's own someone else's math homework with a few lines in the proofs obviously wrong and with obvious corrections.

My question: do these 2 preceding paragraphs of irritating sophistry resemble enough an argument that might hold up in court that I might dare uploading the aria?
 * Dear Dliao, please post your question to this page to get a reply from those who are experts in the area of Wikipedia policy, as this involves possible copyright/legal issues. Thanks. Ariel  ♥  Gold  20:07, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Oops. I looked closer at the score. The aria in question comes originally from the opera Griselda, not a book of Baroque chamber songs. It was scored for violin and figured bass, which means that my anthology has a piano reduction rather than a simply a plausible historic reconstruction of period keyboard performance. It's loosely analogous to converting a photograph to a pencil sketch, but there is a lot more creative input into a piano reduction, so it's a new copyrightable arrangement. I need to get permission from Alfred Publishing.

Image:ClevelandTowerWatercolor20060829.jpg
Hi David,

Just to let you know that the Featured Picture Image:ClevelandTowerWatercolor20060829.jpg is due to make an appearance as Picture of the Day on. If you get a chance, you can check and improve the caption at Template:POTD/2007-07-31.  howcheng  {chat} 00:04, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Barnstar
Sincere thanks. Dliao 01:27, 1 August 2007 (UTC)