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I performed An American in Paris last weekend. The condition of the parts we received from the publisher was appalling.

bloke wrote:Which sounds worse...

Well, when you have to spend several minutes with the score because the tuba part has accidentals that are completely illegible, I dunno...

Oscar Levant was a scream in that movie!!

I like to think I'm a lot like him.

Only without the talent.

It is bad business for the publisher to continue using a set when the parts are overused and over erased. I hope you librarian contacted the publisher for a partial refund.

I hope the entire orchestra put in the same effort you did.

bloke wrote:

Alex C wrote:It is bad business for the publisher to continue using a set when the parts are overused and over erased. I hope you librarian contacted the publisher for a partial refund.

I hope the entire orchestra put in the same effort you did.

I can't understand why the parts would be all marked up. Is there any orchestra that would not play that piece "like the record" ?

bloke "If you want to compare various youtube tuba solos, start fishing around 16:00 or so."

They were not marked up too much. There were some spots where they had been erased through the paper. There was Scotch tape everywhere, the ink had faded in spots and the paper was very yellowed and beginning to crumble. The librarians tried making copies, but could find a setting that didn't cause something to nearly disappear or become too blackened to read.

bloke wrote:

Alex C wrote: Is there any orchestra that would not play that piece "like the record" ?

One of the radio stations I listen to (either NPR or FNR) uses the tuba solo from An American in Paris as a sound byte between segments. I don't know what ensemble, but the "interpretation" (for lack of a better term) is positively atrocious- really awkward phrasing, inappropriate rubato, and questionable tone.

On his Orchestral Excerpts CD, Gene Pokorny demonstrates to what extremes one can go in playing this Gershwin tidbit (not endorsing the real extreme example).

My personal favourite was getting dire warnings about being charged if the parts were not erased before being sent back, but receiving a pile of unerased parts from the publisher.

bloke wrote:Here's the only thing that matters, Mark:

Did you sign your name in the back of the part and date it - along with some clever quip?

If you meant scratched holes through the decaying paper with a felt tip pen, no I did not.

Mark wrote:I performed An American in Paris last weekend. The condition of the parts we received from the publisher was appalling.

http://www.lucksmusic.com/catdetailview ... ogNo=09088

Check the link. The poor condition of the rental parts is a known issue and has been for years and years. At least now they're telling rental customers about it before they rent it!

What most of the bigger orchestras do is make their own set of parts when this happens. This does NOT mean that you "own" the music and can perform it without renting the set. It means you still have to rent the set (gotta pay to play!) but that the rental parts will never make it out of the box and the orchestra will perform using parts the orchestra has created that are clean, clear, legible parts. This is labor intensive, to say the least, and is part of the reason the problem exists: the big orchestras aren't playing off of the crappy rental parts and the small ones don't have the resources (time, money, or personnel) to do anything other than use whatever shows up in the box.

Since it's set to fall into the public domain in less than 3 years anyway, I imagine the publisher isn't super inclined to invest in new parts... and that we'll be seeing it on a LOT of Symphony schedules in 2018.

That would take an act of congress though, and the window on that essentially closed in 2013 with the expiration of the last copyright extension act (pushed through by Sonny Bono on behalf of various LA/Hollywood interests). An American in Paris actually *should* have fallen into the public domain back in 1978, but congress extended copyright terms by 20 years in 1973 then again in 1993.

Be sure though, that the former copyright owners will certainly attempt to enforce copyrights that they no longer own... Disney does this quite successfully on a daily basis, and a lot of the large catalog owners regularly make royalty claims on public domain works on both YouTube and broadcast television.