96: Vive la Justice!

A rights wrong righted

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. You probably all know it by ear, but can you identify the piece?

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 95
Malcolm Arnold, Clarinet Concerto No. 2

This week’s NTT proved to be an absolute stumper, but it was fair play from a fair player, so what’s one to do?

Let’s focus on the bright side though: we had excellent success in the three weeks I (Will) was gone:

Top marks go to Listener Kevin, who wrote in with correct answers all three weeks! Listeners Michael and Marcello also wrote in with correct answers. Nice job, boys!

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

NEWS!

I (Will) am playing catch up with about 100 different things right now, so this week we’ll content ourselves with one triumphant victory for sanity and for music lovers everywhere. Quoth Euronews:

A court in Nanterre, just outside Paris, has ruled that 'Bolero' – among the world’s best-known works of classical music – was written by French composer Maurice Ravel alone.

The case was brought before the court when heirs of celebrated Russian stage designer Alexandre Benois, who worked on the original performance of the piece, argued he should have been credited as a co-author and demanded a share of the proceeds. 

Ravel died at the end of 1937, with his heirs cashing in millions of dollars until the copyright on the work expired in 2016 and the piece entered the public domain [ed: in Europe].

In France, copyright runs for 70 years after a composer's death, though some extra years were added to make up for any losses during the Second World War.

Why is this good for music lovers? Because Ravel’s good-for-nothing heiress, his brother’s masseuse’s wife’s second husband’s daughter, a Swiss stage director named Evelyne Pen de Castel, should not be able to drag this copyright protection into the next century. She’s just as bad as Disney, if not worse.

Sadly, she was forced to pay the nominal restitution of just one euro to SACEM for her disgraceful behavior.

Tone Praise

Erwin Schulhoff, Piano Sonata No. 1

It’s just a YouTube recommendation that I thought was cool.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)