The Copyright of Spring: Igor Stravinsky and U.S. Law
Before The Rite of Spring’s premiere incited a riot in a Paris opera house,[1] Russian composer Igor Stravinsky planned to become a lawyer. He received a degree in jurisprudence from St. Petersburg University in 1905 but decided to focus on music shortly after.[2] His long and prolific career took him from Russia to Europe to the United States, where he lived until his death in 1971.[3] Although he had abandoned his legal aspirations decades before, the law was never far from view in his new homeland. This article will examine the history of Stravinsky’s fraught relationship with United States law and its wider implications for classical music.
Soon after Stravinsky moved to the U.S. in 1939, he settled down in Cambridge, where he delivered six lectures on the poetics of music as part of Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton lecture series.[4] After the end of the academic year, he left the gray, New England skies for sunny Southern California, but he quickly found his way back to Boston. In 1944, Stravinsky returned to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where his unconventional music once again led to controversy — and an encounter with the Boston police.[5]
Surprisingly, The Rite of Spring wasn’t the culprit this time. The piece that so inconvenienced Stravinsky in Boston was none other than the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Stravinsky included his arrangement of the American national anthem in several programs at Symphony Hall. But after its first performance, Boston Police Department officials informed him that he had violated Massachusetts law.[6]
Part IV, Title I, Chapter 264, Section 9 of the General Laws of Massachusetts prohibits “embellishment or addition in the way of national or other melodies” during public performances of the national anthem.[7] The Boston police used the statute, which remains in effect today, to justify their objections to Stravinsky’s arrangement — whose harmonies, though dissonant at times, are still a far cry from the near-atonality of The Rite of Spring. Although Stravinsky complied with law enforcement and removed the piece from future programs, the incident gave rise to a legend that Stravinsky’s spin on the “Star-Spangled Banner” landed him in jail.[8] But his arrest would have been impossible even if he had refused to pull the piece: the maximum punishment for offenders is a $100 fine.[9]
Soon afterward, another of Stravinsky’s ballets — The Firebird — ensnared the composer in a legal battle. Stravinsky had written two previous versions but, as different foreign publishers held their rights, created a third in 1945. He sold its rights to the Leeds Music Corporation, an American company, which then published a jukebox arrangement of one of the ballet’s dance themes. Not only did they release this version without Stravinsky’s permission, but they also falsely claimed that the composer himself had arranged it. Furious at the publisher and the arrangement’s intended audience, whom he called “vulgar Broadway people,” Stravinsky sued Leeds in 1947.[10]
Stravinsky lost the case but continued to decry the practice of unauthorized adaptations: In his autobiography, he voices concerns about the “distortion of … [his] … compositions by future interpreters.”[11] Despite his strong opposition to others’ arrangements of his music, Stravinsky showed no qualms against publishing new versions of his own works in order to reaffirm his control over them. In fact, his decision to republish The Firebird brought about his involvement with Leeds in the first place. Nor did he hesitate to tinker with other composers’ works: He regularly made use of existing material in his compositions[12], and his infamous reworking of the national anthem is just one example. How ironic that a composer who readily tinkered with the likes of Tchaikovsky and Pergolesi would balk at the thought of his music receiving the same treatment!
But even after Stravinsky’s death in 1971,[13] the controversies surrounding his music were far from over. Excerpts from The Rite of Spring appeared in the Disney animated film Fantasia. Stravinsky’s publisher, Boosey and Hawkes, filed a lawsuit against Disney decades after its release. Boosey and Hawkes asserted that Stravinsky, who had sold them the rights to the ballet’s score and granted the rights for public screenings of the film, had never agreed for its use in home video release.[14] And of course he hadn’t — videocassettes weren’t even commercially available at the time of the film’s release. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit granted partial summary judgment to Boosey and Hawkes,[15] but the outcome raises questions about the complicated nature of copyright law. How can courts deal with the dynamics of artists’ rights and constantly changing technology? Was Disney justified in using Stravinsky’s score? Would Stravinsky even have cared? After all, he called the film’s treatment of his music “execrable.”[16]
In 1994, a year after the Fantasia fiasco, Congress passed the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, granting copyright protection to some works that had previously been in the public domain, among them scores, recordings, and performance rights of Stravinsky’s music.[17]
How beneficial is legislation that claims to protect composers’ works by imposing limits on their use? Many musicians were indignant at the new expenses and restrictions on the repertoire they could perform, fearing that they could exacerbate the already notorious inaccessibility of classical music. Among them was conductor Lawrence Golan, who argued that the government should not have extended copyright protection to works once in the public domain.[18]The Supreme Court heard his case, Golan v. Holder, in 2011 and upheld the 1994 act.[19] But Chief Justice John Roberts differed from the majority opinion. In his defense of preserving the status of works already in the public domain, he challenged the principles Stravinsky had staunchly defended while invoking, of all pieces, Jimi Hendrix’s distinctive rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” [20]One can only wonder what Stravinsky would have thought.
[1] "Stravinsky, Igor Feodorovich." In Who's Who in the Twentieth Century, edited by Market House Books: Oxford University Press, 1999. https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780192800916.001.0001/acref-9780192800916-e-1551.
[2] Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. "Igor Stravinsky," published September 20, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Igor-Stravinsky.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Igor Stravinsky. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. 1st Vintage Ed.] ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
[5] Colin Brumley. "Stravinsky's Run-in with the Boston Police." 99.5 WCRB: Classical Radio Boston. Last modified June 29, 2019. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.classicalwcrb.org/post/stravinskys-run-boston-police#stream/0.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 264, § XI.
[8] Brumley, “Stravinsky.”
[9] Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 264, § XI.
[10] Paul K. Saint-Amour. Modernism and Copyright. Modernist Literature & Culture. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: 114-115
[11] Peter Szendy. Listen: A History of Our Ears. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
[12] Joseph McLellan. "Steal That Tune." 99.5 The Washington Post. Last modified July 31, 1994. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1994/07/31/steal-that-tune/f053c466-0055-49ba-ba52-fa49a649e823/.
[13] Encyclopedia Britannica, “Igor Stravinsky.”
[14] James Barron. "Who Owns The Rights To 'Rite'?" The New York Times. Last modified January 1993.
Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/22/nyregion/
who-owns-the-rights-to-rite.html.
[15] Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers v. Walt Disney (2d Cir.).
[16] Barron. "Who Owns The Rights To 'Rite'?"
[17] U.S. Congress. 1994.
[18] Anastasia Tsioulcas. "The Supreme Court To Consider ... Prokofiev?" NPR. Last modified June 9,
2011. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2011/06/10/
137080114/the-supreme-court-to-consider-prokofiev.
[19] Associated Press. "Supreme Court Invokes Copland, Hendrix in Copyright Case." WXQR: New York Public
Radio. Last modified October 6, 2011. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.wqxr.org/story/
163202-supreme-court-invokes-copland-hendrix-copyright-case/.
[20] Ibid.