Mozart' s Copyrights

Today is Wolfgang Mozart’s 250th birthday. His German biographer Wolfgang Hildesheimer wrote that Mozart “was not the first poor musical artist, but he was the first free one, and he was poor because he was free.”

In Mozart’s day, musicians worked in the retinues of wealthy patrons. They composed what their patrons requested of them and they were treated as household servants. But in the cities, audiences for music were growing and musicians were finding new ways to reach them. Mozart tried to make a living trying to serve an audience rather than a master.

It was not easy. He got a fee to compose "Cosi fan tutte" in 1789. But in 1790, when "Cosi fan tutte" was taking the concert halls of Europe by storm, he was begging a Vienna theatre manager to lend him a little money so he could afford work on something new. He was successful; he just could not get paid for the value of what he was providing.

To be an artist without a patron, Mozart needed a copyright regime. The concept of copyright did exist; Mozart did earn some copyright income. But in the midst of cultural and technological change, the dissemination of music was running ahead of the systems by which creators were rewarded.

Mozart ran with the changes. He promoted his own concerts, and he appreciated the recently invented piano (pianoforte, he called it) not least because it was cost-effective: it allowed a solo artist to play virtuoso music loudly enough for the large new concert halls. But despite his successes, a secure income always eluded him, and he faced the usual criticisms artists receive. He should compose for love, not whine about money. He could get a teaching job. He could get grants. If he couldn’t make it in the market place, it must be his own fault. Even his first biographer, the scholarly Otto Jain, thought Mozart should have accepted his station and lived within his means.

We live in a moment when cultural and technological changes are once again challenging us as to how to encourage access to creative work and to sustain creators at the same time. Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s take on how it works is still closer than Professor Jain’s.

Play a little night music tonight.

Reading Ged Martin

What are you reading? I’ve been reading Ged Martin, Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History (from University of Toronto Press, 2004).

Ged Martin is a British historian long interested in Canada and other countries that were Britain's empire. He has written some good and provocative books, notably on constitutional history. What distinguishes this book – the most entertaining work about the hows and whys of doing history I’ve encountered since Historians’ Fallacies – is his extraordinary range of reference.

Maybe Ged Martin hasn’t read everything, but he’s read most of it, and he was taking notes all the time. This book is about how to do history, but he illustrates his propositions with fresh, funny, startling quotations or anecdotes by the score, usually demonstrating someone's incomprehension of either his or her own time or some past time. Because he has worked so much on Canadian subjects, many of the best are Canadian. But he also quotes liberally from British, Australian, Irish, and American sources. They are worth the price of admission in themselves.

I discovered some years ago that I owe something to Ged Martin, and I’ve felt oddly about it ever since. I once interviewed him in the early 1990s for a radio program I was making. Years late I wrote a book on the subject. And years after that, I discovered, glancing at the “Ideas” transcript, that an elegant observation I made in the preface of the book was not my own fresh and original musing, as I fondly imagined, but a very direct borrowing from what Ged Martin had said to me in our interview. I remembered the specific ideas almost verbatim, but I so completely forgot where I got them that I thought they were my own.

I’m glad to say my book 1867 did warmly acknowledge Ged Martin’s wisdom and wit. But the shock gave me a vivid appreciation of how easily a writer can slip into the position from which accusations of plagiarism arise.

So I am relieved not to appear in Past Futures as an example of egregious appropriation (or worse) by historians. And glad, too, to catch in it a hint of influences exchanged. Martin briefly cites my Louisbourg Portraits in Past Futures, and he also mentions something about the song “Rule Britannia” that sounds quite like something I had said about it in my book. If his idea draws on mine, he’s welcome.

The philosophy of history is a minority taste, I suppose. But if you are part of that minority that ponders what history is for and how it can be done well, I recommend Ged Martin. That’s Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History, from University of Toronto Press in 2004.

China story

Forget yesterday's election for a moment. We don't do instant history here.

Your Beaver magazine should be arriving any day now -- you do subscribe, I hope. My column this issue is about China and how China has been a part of Canada's history.

On November 9, 1885, as part of its coverage of the last spike, driven the previous day at Craigallachie, B.C., the Toronto Globe noted that Canada was not the only place building railroads. Europeans were building railroads and ports and factories in China. And surely the same prosperity that railroads and industry were bringing to Canada must also blossom in China.

Therefore, said the paper, as railroads and industry transform China, “ the laborious, sober, ingenious Chinese will become penetrated with modern industrial civilization, and then Chinese will not need to emigrate. They will have but to stay home and manufacture for export and manufacture on such terms as Europeans and Americans workmen could not even look at.”

Does that sounds like what all the experts are predicting in 2006?

One hundred years of history at M&S

McClelland & Stewart, the great Canadian publisher, marks its hundredth anniversary in 2006. Among its commemorative activities, it is promoting "The Essential 100," 100 great M&S titles still in print and available. Their list is not so rich in histories as I might have expected, but one of the hundred is my own Louisbourg Portraits, first published in 1982 and an M&S title since 2000. Check the whole list at www.mcclelland.com

A political moment

If you take an interest in Canadian politics, you should read Stephen Harper's short political history of Canada in this speech he gave to an American Christian organization some years ago. (Later note: Paul Martin quoted from it in the televised debates.) Reading the whole thing, I was reminded of Harper's odd hedging at the start of the campaign when journalists asked him if he loved his country. Still, taken as a hostile critique of how we run our politics, it offers some things to think about. Take a look.

http://www.latchkey.net/columns/archives/001166.html