User talk:Stuartm

Welcome

Welcome to CPDL! We hope you will contribute much and well. You will probably want to read the help pages. Again, welcome and have fun! Claude (talk) 07:19, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Hymns (Louis K. Liu)

Hi Stuart, I would like to transcribe a few of these hymns. Do you know, are the hymns (music or words) in this book under copyright? Thanks! — Barry Johnston (talk) 01:32, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Barry (talk), Glad to hear from you.

I have tried to obtain more information about the copyright question also. CPDL have a document (  授權書) which indicates that they may be used under the standard CPDL licence. It also seems clear from the available information in the hymn book itself that the intention was to place the hymns into the public domain for unrestricted use in the worship of our God and therefore for performance. However I understand, perhaps incorrectly but nevertheless, that in the UK it is not possible to place works that are subject to copyright, even if the copyright belongs to you, into the public domain. They only fall into PD after the expiration of the copyright. The most you can do is something like what is written in the declaration by Liu's widow held here by CPDL retaining copyright but allowing certain uses of the works. The declaration together with the preamble then appear to allow us to make copies of the works in any form appropriate for our use of them providing our use of them is within the framework provided by the hymn book. Whether the understanding is similar in the USA, I must leave you to decide.

The preamble seems to indicate that the hymns have already been digitised in scoring software, but in the absence of any copies of these (it seemed strange to me that if they did exist Tz-Yi Jiang had not also uploaded them) and what else has been written in the preamble, I had planned, after completing the extraction of the Chinese text (getting the hardest bit out of the way first) to notate the hymns in Noteworthy to place them here under the standard CPDL licence.

I do not wish to take ownership of that project however, it was a request from Claude Tallet to provide the Chinese text for these and other works of Liu that brought me here in the first place, so I am happy to know you wish to transcribe them. If you do so, would you like me to proof read them for you?

On the question of proof reading, no-one has yet checked my transcription of the Chinese characters. The font which has been used in the hymn book does not exactly match the fonts that are used on the CPDL page. It has been quite difficult to identify some of them so the wrong character may have slipped in. If you feel up to checking it, please do, but I shall - eventually - pass the texts across to a native speaker for review.

Sorry to write as much as this, when perhaps simple yesses and noes would have sufficed. So, the words and the music are still under copyright, but under the CPDL licence I think we can do whatever we want with them within the framework provided by the hymnbook. Transcriptions therefore made available for use in public and private worship fall within that framework.

As far as we can tell the music is original to Liu, though whether he has adapted anything from traditional Chinese works we do not know. Some of his other works appear to have roots in folk music, but the settings are his. The words are, in the main, taken from Scripture, and suitably adapted by him for the hymns. We would perhaps have to enquire whether the Chinese translation he used is still in copyright, but we would also have to consider whether he produced his own translation from the original languages which simply happened to use the same words as any particular translation in copyright. The adaptation of the texts however is his.

Again, sorry, not a simple yes or no!

Finally, you said you wished to transcribe a few of the hymns, which ones do you have in mind, for if not all of them, then I can make the ones you do want to do a priority for the production of the Chinese text, otherwise it will be as and when.

Kind regards

Stuartm (talk) 13:55, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Stuart, thanks for your graceful explanatory communication. I particularly appreciate your careful analysis.

So far, I have finished transcribing no. 1, "Serve the Lord", and I'm about halfway through no. 2, "The Lord is My Shepherd". I am currently using MuseScore3 for transcription. No. 2 is anthem-like, approaching "through-composed". And you're right, there are elements that could be traditional music (the flute intro) or song derived from another source (the hymn itself). This is fairly high-quality music. I wonder, has it been used in a church? Origins and history of the words and music are beyond me, and await more serious investigation and literature surveys, perhaps by scholars. That's the main reason I am interested, to try to get greater exposure of these works to a larger musical community, which they deserve.

Thanks for sending the Authorization; I didn't know of it. As I read it, permission has been granted to post the book on CPDL, and for further non-commercial dissemination of the book – not for transcription, and certainly not for dissemination of the music in a form other than the book. The book and its contents are apparently under U. S. copyright of recent date. So I will stop transcribing for now, and wait further developments.

As far as I know, the text you have posted is a good idea – as you pointed out, most of it is scripture or normal modifications of it, that composers and editors frequently do to fit it to music. Continuing to pursue native-speaker proofing of these is also good, but there is no need to intensify your effort on my account.

Thanks again for your reply – I guess I'm not the only one who gives detailed answers to simple questions! — Barry Johnston (talk) 20:59, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Barry (talk),

Thank you for your reply, and the work you have done. My first thought was that you should not stop transcribing these works, I have some confidence that when we do eventually track down who currently holds the copyright, we shall discover that they are quite happy for it to have been done. The stated purpose in the hymnbook is that they should become available for the wider church. The transcription of them into a digital music format promotes that purpose far more than the pdf does.

The article about Louis K. Liu and other things I have read but have not recorded where I saw them, tell us that he conducted choirs and wrote these hymns for use in the Chinese church. Although we have no direct evidence that any in particular have been used or when, it is almost unthinkable that a conductor would not have had his choir sing them. The preamble, reading between the lines, suggests that. This is true of his secular works, for at least one of them (Seeing Flower ( 見花如見她 )) is available in performance on Bilibili.

Coming back to copyright, although the Bilibili page declares: Reprinting is prohibited without the authorisation of the author (未经作者授权，禁止转载), it does not indicate who the author is, though we know it was Liu. It also refers to CPDL for the score, which indicates that copyright is 1963, which in the absence of any other evidence must be Liu not Tz-Yi Jiang who posted it to CPDL. That is not to say that Tz-Yi Jiang is not the one who transcribed it to produce the pdf. The copyright in the music, and the transcription of it, for it is the music which is the work not its transcription, remains with Liu's heirs. Of course the prohibition may simply refer to the reproduction of the performance of this work, which appears to be quite recent by the date on the page (13/09/2019) and have nothing to do with work itself.

So, my conclusion is that it is safe to transcribe these works and publish them on CPDL alongside the pdf of the hymn book. I infer that Claude Tallet appears to have reached a similar conclusion in relation to Liu's secular works for he has extracted mxl files for even this one, Seeing Flower, which imports a score reasonably well into Harmony, though it still needs to be tidied up. The pdf files for the secular works appear, unlike the hymn book, to have been produced by music scoring software.

Perhaps I could have added, though many words flow from the mouth of the fool, that longer explanations do provide the better opportunities to challenge what is being said. I hope I am not afraid of being told that I have got it wrong; it is better to be told than continue in one's folly for iron sharpens iron.

Finally, your stated purpose in transcribing them, though I hardly need say it, aligns exactly with Tz-Yi Jiang's purpose in providing the hymn book here in the first place, which brings me back to my first thought, without repeating it. It is over to you. :-)

PS on an entirely different subject, after Liu's name in the second paragraph above there is a line-break: what have I got wrong in typing this note up that gves a line-break? I had expected Liu's name to appear in-line. – Stuartm (talk) 14:15, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks much for the careful response – I wasn't criticizing your long responses, because I frequently do it too!

I am going to put the copyright question to people who know much more about this than I; meanwhile I will continue my transcription of no. 2. For lyrics, I have simply been pasting the text characters into the score, one character at a time, checking each against the book. If you wish to proofread, I would need your email – mine is listed on my user page.

About your last question: you had used the template {{Composer}}, which automatically inserts a new-line; this template is intended for use only on work pages, because it assigns the page on which it appears to the composer cited. So for a time this talk page was listed as a composition of Louis K. Liu! I have corrected it, using the standard way of citing any page, between double square brackets. You used the template {{NoCo}} later in the paragraph; this template links to the work ONLY if it is used on a composer page, or the composer template is used on the page. (That's why it now shows red ink.) You should have used either "{{NoComp|Seeing Flower|Louis K. Liu}}" or "[[Seeing Flower (Louis K. Liu)]]". — Barry Johnston (talk) 18:33, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Barry,

Thank you for your correction and explanation about what I had got wrong. I shall email you. I look forward to hearing more about the USA's view of the copyright question, and shall let you know if I ever get a responce also.

Stuartm (talk) 08:06, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi Stuart, I have received a reply from another administrator at CPDL who knows much about copyright. He (Max) says,

"If the editor was allowed by the composer to upload the entire book, and the copyright policy specified by the editor is "personal" without any details about the permitted uses, the copyright policy defaults to the standard CPDL policy. The CPDL policy allows to freely transcribe etc. provided that the editor of the original edition is credited." — Barry Johnston (talk) 17:20, 9 March 2023 (UTC)