Category talk:Brian, Havergal

Re: works PD-US

Going by Worklist by type at havergalbrian.org, the list of works first published before 1923 and still extant is slim. For valour, however, was first published in 1914 by Breitkopf und Härtel; Come o’er the Sea to a text by Thomas Mo[o]re (U. Pittsburgh; British Library) was published by the same company in or ca. 1908 as were Three songs for contralto or baritone in or ca. 1913, and By the Waters of Babylon (British Library) in or ca. 1907; Festal Dance was published in 1914. (For Valour and Festal Dance I know have been recorded, the latter twice.) So there’s some works that can be included on the imslp.us server, as is not the case with Shosty at this time. (Other non-Breitkopf ones I’m sure- will try to extend the list later, in fact.) (Also, RAM has the Breitkopf score, also the parts, of Doctor Merryheart : a comedy overture for orchestra listed and the 1914 one of In memoriam : tone poem for orchestra; and the vocal score of By the Waters of Babylon op.11 also. no libraries found with For Valour, as yet, but perhaps the ones that do just don't register with WorldCat and also aren’t known to me or i haven't thought of them at the moment, of course...) He also arranged, for voices and piano I am guessing, in 1938, two songs from the Handel (or “Handel?”) cantata Venus and Adonis.) Eric 15:03, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Hi Eric! Breitkopf’s London office published six orchestral pieces in full score in 1914: the two you didn’t mention above are English Suite No. 1 (op.12), and the Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme (on “Three Blind Mice” – just as Holbrooke had done). The latter piece, together with Festal Dance, comprise the two surviving movements of Brian’s first symphonic essay, the Fantastic Symphony of 1907/08, and whose eventual demotion from Brian’s symphonic canon caused the “Gothic” to drop into the top spot.
My own work on a thematic catalogue for Brian is waiting for another day to continue, but you’ll find several more items there.
Vocal:
  • Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Shakespeare) Op. 5, B&H 1905
  • Stars of a summer night (Longfellow) Op. 1, Novello 1908
  • The vision of Cleopatra, tragic poem (Cumberland) Op. 14, Bosworth 1908/09 (vocal score only)
  • Grace for a child (Herrick), Curwen 1914
  • What does little birdie say? (A. Tennyson), Curwen 1914
  • The mountain and the squirrel (R.W. Emerson), Curwen 1914
  • Summer has come, little children (Cumberland), Curwen 1914
  • The fly (Blake), Augener 1922
  • 5 songs of Temple Keble, Enoch 1920
  • The defiled sanctuary (Blake), Enoch 1920
  • The soul of steel (C.M. Masterman), Enoch 1921
Piano:
The first two of these piano pieces were reprinted by the Havergal Brian Society in 1985 and are widely available – I believe these two will probably appear on IMSLP·US in the near future. The short four bar fanfare (more or less identical with the piano reduction of the vocal score) is of course from “The Tigers”, appearing under its original title: Jason Huffman scanned it for his website’s archive.
The works published after 1923 up until 1972 make fairly thin pickings, but there is I suppose the possibility that some of the more obscure publications weren’t renewed in the US. It would be rather nice, for example, if the Gothic and the VS of The Tigers both came available sooner than 2023, rather than being [TB] blocked until 2028, when the usual 95-year term of US copyright would expire: Cranz published these in 1932.
Finally, I noticed that the (rather useless) HathiTrust Digital Library had scanned 11 publications:
  1. Gothic FS 259pp.
  2. Solo piano music 80pp.
  3. Symphony 22 MS 26pp.
  4. The Tigers VS 325pp.
  5. Fantastic Variations FS 46pp.
  6. Legend pf+vl 9+[2]pp.
  7. Symphony 7 MS 87pp.
  8. Symphony 8 MS 49pp.
  9. Symphony 10 MS 40pp.
  10. Symphony 21 MS 60pp.
  11. Violin Concerto pf+vl score+part 33+16pp.
Naturally, all of these are unavailable – it seems anything musical is “copyright restricted”. However, the records indicate these scores were scanned from items held by the Universities of Michigan (1–4) and California (5–11), which might be helpful for our US-based contributors.
Philip Legge @ © talk 22:19, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Like Google, Hathitrust rather mechanically takes Musica Viva’s “1976” copyright on the Legend, just for example, to heart, and similarly for uncountably many scores by earlier composers too, whereas we take more effort to determine the difference between reprints and new editions, and real copyright and copyfraud. Glad to see some scores uploaded to the PD-US server though. (I have to learn to do that - I want to upload Sibley’s copies of, iirc and again for example, Wellesz’s (d.1974) first two string quartets and other works. I’ve heard a movement of one of those from MIDI reproduction and later works of his from CD performances and like his music quite a lot...) Eric 03:21, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I gather that you’re actually in a part of the world where you could make contributions to the IMSLP·US server with impunity, so anything you can get your hands on would be valuable. The posthumous date of first publication of the Legend is accurate, more or less: Lewis Foreman’s catalogue (incl. in Reginald Nettel’s “Havergal Brian and his Music”, London: Dennis Dobson, 1976) cites the year 1975.
Other items: the Handel songs from Venus and Adonis (“Dear Adonis” and “Transporting Joy”) date from 1937 (published by Augener in 1938 with a facsimile of the original MSs) and Brian’s piano accompaniment is by no means an “urtext”, so a check for copyright renewal would be necessary. The following items haven’t yet been updated on the worklist, but the pub. info comes from Foreman:
  • Tell me, thou Soul of her I love (Thomson), Novello 1906
  • Soul Star (Helen Bantock), Bosworth 1907
  • Rondel: In a fairy boat (Weller), Breitkopf 1908
  • Come o’er the Sea (Moore), Breitkopf 1908
  • Fairies’ Song (Cumberland), Novello 1908
  • Daybreak (Longfellow), Novello 1912
  • If I had but two little wings (Coleridge), Augener 1914
  • The lamb (Kingsley), Augener 1914
  • The White Lily (McDonald), Augener 1914
  • Lullaby of an infant chief (Scott), Breitkopf 1914
  • Ye spotted snakes (Shakespeare), Curwen 1914
  • Goodbye to Summer (Allingham), Novello 1914
  • The Moon, Augener 1917
  • A Child’s Prayer (Betham-Edwards), Augener 1917
  • Infant Joy (Blake), Augener 1917
  • Laughing Song (Blake), Augener 1917
  • The Little Boy Found (Blake), Augener 1917
  • The Little Boy Lost (Blake), Augener 1917
  • Violets (Herrick), Augener 1917
  • Spring—Sound the Flute (Blake), Augener 1919, 1922 (2 versions)
  • Fair Pledges of a fruitful Tree (Herrick), OUP 1921
  • Absence (Anonymous), Augener 1922
  • The Phantom Wooer (Beddoes), Augener 1922
  • Pastoral: The Shepherd (Blake), Augener 1922
  • The Dream (Blake), Augener 1922
  • The Echoing Green (Blake), Augener 1922
  • The Fly (Blake), Augener 1922
  • The River (Cumberland), Augener 1922
  • The Fairy Palace (Drayton), Augener 1922
  • Pack Clouds away (Heywood), Augener 1922
  • Spring, the sweet Spring (Nash), Augener 1922
  • And will he not come again (Shakespeare), Augener 1922
  • A Song of Willow (Shakespeare), Augener 1922
  • Fear no more the heat of the Sun (Shakespeare), Augener 1922
  • It was a Lover and his Lass (Shakespeare), Augener 1922
  • Under the Greenwood Tree (Shakespeare), Augener 1922
So quite a fair proportion of the small-scale vocal music (solos and partsongs, accompanied and unaccompanied) would qualify for US hosting. Philip @ © talk 00:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
  • looks over the edits, confused no end, but resolves to consider the meaning of the plain template at leisure :) ... as to IMSLP-US ... central New York State at this time, so if I learn a few of the details with practice to start with of course, I should be able to upload the four items Sibley has for Wellesz (quartets 1 and 2, and two vocal works), and some other things Sibley has that I've noticed are by non-PD-CA composers like four works by Richard Rössler (1880–1962) that look interesting, (lots of etc.) ... - so when I'm back next week from a weekend vacation, maybe I should start learning this; others are already expanding the Sibley Mirroring Project in this way and I'm happy to join in. Anyhow, this isn't related to Brian- sorry. Thanks for the worklist- very useful indeed, if I can augment it (with plate numbers, Hofmeister confirmatory information -- probably utterly unnecessary but too much is never enough- or anything... shall endeavor so to do. Am enjoying starting semi-worklists of some very little-known composers that may or may not go anywhere, will see... anyway.) Perhaps to continue on a talk page or Facebook profile of one of ours. ;) Cheers! Eric 01:56, 18 February 2011 (UTC)