By RADIOGIRL [from Comments to Stephen Hough’s blog post on Liszt, Daily Telegraph] – Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now in place guidelines with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), that any qualified public broadcasting station that wishes to broadcast sound recordings over the Internet must not only register for agreement for those rights but must comply with the new rules. (BTW, this does not apply to commercial webcasters such as WQXR nor does it apply to recordings of live performances made for broadcast purposes.)

Some adjustments can be made but the major stumbling point is this: There is now a limit on the number of selections from the same recording that can be played in a three hour period. For a single sound recording no more than three selections may be played and only two may be played consecutively. This poses a significant difficulty for a programming philosophy which has always centered on the belief that a composer’s work should be heard as it was intended to be enjoyed: as a complete piece of music.
As one of the few locally programmed classical music stations whose website streaming service records hits regularly from over 50 countries across the world counting among its listeners US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan this is a debilitating turn of events.

We and other stations across the country have been ignoring the new regulations for over a year because everyone agrees they aren’t appropriate for classical music webcasters. Some continue to do so and are providing the required laborious streaming reports (which we have also been doing but all are marked incomplete and in violation. ) Sister stations are receiving warning letters now and at stake is the license to broadcast.

Comments continue at Stephen Hough’s Daily Telegraph blog

Liszt: heaving jewels on bosoms with dazzling fingers.

By STEPHEN HOUGH [Daily Telegraph] – Liszt on-stage, with dazzling fingers on the keyboard causing dazzling jewels to heave on bosoms in the audience, is the predominant image most people have of him.  But when he moved to Weimar in semi-retirement in his mid-30s he began a far more profound and significant process of invention than his pianistic acrobatics in the fashionable salons.

The influences that shape new musical trends are diffuse, complex, and impossible to codify, but if one person can be credited as being the fountainhead of modern music it is Franz Liszt … in three, totally different stylistic directions.  Whether we like his own compositions or not, we cannot avoid contact with Liszt if we have contact with music from the late-19th or 20th centuries. Firstly, the heady combination of bel canto with chromaticism, a Lisztian fingerprint formed early in his life, was a major influence on Wagner and on to the latter’s progeny.  It has been claimed that Liszt invented the ‘Tristan chord’.  Even if such a ‘patent’ is open to discussion, the febrile harmonic instability of Tristan und Isolde is heard in Liszt before it is heard in his son-in-law.  On rare occasions of collegial generosity Wagner even admitted this debt.

Continued at The Daily Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.