The Carter Family found this out when they tried to release songbooks of their legendary recordings, only to find out they’d signed over exclusive rights to producer Ralph Peer; over nearly a century the music industry’s exploitation of artists has been a national disgrace. Somehow this sad fact has escaped notice by the trade association of our broadcast industry, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

That is, until now.

The NAB has had a sudden attack of moral conscience, occasioned by the record labels trying to shake them down to start paying the performer of a work as well as the songwriter. They’re now suddenly standing up for the poor downtrodden artist. Until stations began playing records in the 50s, most music on the radio was performed live, by artists who were paid by the stations.

When commercial records took over at the rise of “disk jockey” shows, the musicians unions forced stations to hire “record turners,” but those have now disappeared as well, and they didn’t represent the recording artist, they represented the legacy musicians who were fired because they were no longer needed.

Through the rise of internet and satellite radio, the NAB stood by mute as those new media agreed to pay performance fees, often to the record companies who had usurped the performers’ rights through work for hire contracts. So the NAB’s sudden concern rings a little hollow, but not as hollow as their attempt to misrepresent performance fees as a “tax.” Paying a performer for a song’s performance on the radio is no more a “performance tax” than paying a station to run commercials is a “marketing tax.”

The NAB is too late. The downtrodden performers have already found a way out of the mess through owning their own labels and often distributing their own music. This means that the NAB is only fighting the RIAA for the older product. Performance fees for the new product will likely go right to the performer.

But the worst thing the NAB has done with this ruse, is to prove that it will say anything to make money. That’s the wrong thing for a trade association to do when it represents the companies who claim they should be trusted to hold public licenses to use the public airwaves to bring us news and “official information.”

And you also heard Aaron Copland. A lot of Copland, from The Lincoln Portrait which accompanied Hanks’ reading, to strains of Simple Gifts,  one of the themes blended by John Williams for his arrangement for Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, also used by Copland for his Appalachian Suite, to Fanfare for the Common Man. Our list of American composers of ceremonial music is short, and runs the range of styles from John Philip Sousa to Mr. Williams. But the dean is Aaron Copland whose pioneering styles can still be heard in modern film composers like James Newton Howard.

I couldn’t help thinking how proud Aaron Copland would have been; a proud Socialist during the 30s FDR administration. A man who loved his country not in the “love it or leave it” frame, but “love it and improve it.”  He wrote the soundtrack for monumental progress that would happen long after his death.

Perhaps Copland and Lincoln were both looking down at us in our time of great progress and great peril. Thinking of that, I started experimenting with Copland and Copland-like themes as an arranging project, which I’ve posted here. The middle portion is real Copland, performed at the Obama Lincoln celebration and narrated live by Tom Hanks. These are real instruments playing real Copland music in a fair-use sized chunk. The surrounding music, accompanying Mr. Obama, are my composition and orchestration realized by the East-West Symphony Orchestra sample set being driven by Sonar 7 Producer.

Most browsers should play the files below by clicking the links. Don’t attempt the lossless WMA without a fast connection.

President’s Day Copland Tribute – mp3

President’s Day Copland Tribute – wma (lossless 18meg)

President’s Day Copland tribute – wma (compressed 1.8 meg)

A modern Madeira (m'dear)

When the Portuguese started shipping their wine to the world in casks on sailing ships they didn’t know it was being stepped on by the heat of the passage in warm holds through tropical waters. Until one day one of the ships returned with its cargo of Madeira unsold.

When the Portuguese tasted their superheated wine, they were shocked; it hadn’t been helped by the long travel in the heat. Or had it? It had a taste that was shocking at first, but strangely captivating.

So we listened to Jim Bianco again, and again. We started dissecting it like the Portuguese picking through the tastes and flavors of their mutated wine. Though we had only three Bianco cuts, and two of them were alternate versions of the same song, we had taste after taste.

Is it meter that makes I have a thing for you so interesting, or is it phrasing or is it some combiantion of both? And it wasn’t long before we, like the Portugese sampling their tortured wine, were drunk on Jim Bianco, and couldn’t remember what we found objectionable about it at our first taste,

It was made at the Mason & Hamlin factory in Boston in early 1930, just months after the Wall Street crash of October 1929. Pianos had been a feature of nearly every parlor in America, first because someone in a family usually played it, and then because pneumatic player actions could turn them into music machines.

Master technician Jerry at Danny's Piano

But the radio the Victrola and then the amplified phonograph started to change the way Americans and music interfaced. We first stopped playing it ourselves, and then we stopped creating it in the home, deciding to import it. By the time the market crashed, pianos were already in decline, and the crash finished off many manufactures.

Mason & Hamlin (because it was a quality name–Serge Rachmaninov insisted on them for concerts) was bought by the Aeolian Piano company, makers of the Ampico pneumatic player system, for $450,000. My piano was probably in that inventory. Aeolian put a player action in it.

I don’t know much about where it traveled until my grandparents bought it for me in the late 1960s. It had been rebuilt and refinished in Downey, California. But by then, pneumatic player actions were popular only with a few collectors and tinkerers, so it was removed and a piece of wood added to cover where the mechanism linked to the hammers.

Since then, my piano has been across the country three times. To Florida from California, back to Las Vegas (where it was baked when a thermostat malfunctioned, breaking the soundboard) and back to Florida, where again it was the victim of the economy. At one point it was discovered abandoned at the back door of a piano dealer in distress.

But somehow it persevered to be rebuilt and to have a new mechanism installed that uses solenoids and microprocessors, not compressed air and rolls of punched paper. No doubt on its way to its first delivery in 1930, it passed newsboys crying of a worsening economy. Today, on our way to inspect it, we got an automated text message from the NYT: “Stock fall sharply on fears of deepening recession…”

In a few weeks, when the special place for it is ready at the house, it will come home again. Maybe the first thing I should play on it, is “Buddy, can you spare a dime.” Its a tune that it probably knows very well.