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MUSEUMS, COMMERCIALISM AND INSTRUMENT DRAWINGS
E. Segerman and D. Abbott
Several museums holding early instruments have been issuing drawings of
these instruments at very commercial prices. The drawings are usually made very
attractively and the price is comparable with other objects on the market which are
similarly interesting as wall decoration. Another justification given by museum
officials for the commercial price is that instrument makers are going to make profits
from instruments constructed from the drawings, and the museum has a right to share
in these profits. Though we could argue the last point, we will accept these justitications.
Nevertheless we feel that there are many non-commercial instrument makers needing
authentic design information on early instruments who are not being properly catered for.
They often cannot afford to buy a commercially-macle instrument and are willing to trade
considerale labour for cost to get an appropriate instrument to play on. The price of
the drawing could doublé the financial outlay to make an instrument, and this can be a
hardship.
Another way that these museums neglect the amateur maker is that often not
enough information is included in the drawing for an inexperienced maker to construct
an instrument. The experienced maker can make better gucsses as to what this
information will be, but the probability that he will produce a reasonably accurate copy
is stili lowered.
We do not argue with this policy if a museum wants to restrict its intended
markets to interior decorators and professional makers, though we are sure that there
is an element of convenient self-delusion involved in that amateur makers are a large
fraction if not the majority of their customers.
We have been shocked to discover that many museums expect to make the same
profits from the sale of drawings of their instruments even if the measurements and
the drawings are made by others and if the others intend to distribute these drawings
on a non-prof it basis. Their legai position on this with respect to copywright law is
highly questionarle (see Com. 28). So is their moral position as publicly supported
caretakers of artefacts of our common history. Nevertheless we organologists need the
cooperation of the museums in our researches so we need to play the game according
to their rules no matter how illegal or immoral these may be.
We appreciate that museums are underfinanced, in that what they feel they need
to do costs more than their given budgets allow, so commercial operations can be very
helpful. But whom to thus commercially exploit can be a problem when their prime
purpose is to serve the public, present and future. Those who themselves commercially
exploit the museums' holdings are reasonable victims, but what is a commercial
enterprise is often a question of arbitrary interpretation. NRI Design Service, though
non-profit, does charge money for the designs, and this factor alone seems to be enough
for museums to class us as "commercial". If we paid the royalty the museums seem to
expect it would more than doublé the cost of most of the designs to our members. Our
members are hungry for information on instrument design, and since early instruments
were much more diverse than modem ones, many designs need to be collected to get a
perspective of the range involved in authentic design. Because of this need for
quantity such a high price in designs is unacceptable.
Our pian then is to try to workup designs in a rather scholarly and unartistic
way and seek permission to distribute them from the museums holding the originai
instruments. If they demand their pound of flesh for this permission, we will jre-do
the design in a more scholarly and even less artistic way and try again. At worst the
information could ali be verbal.and numerical with geometrica! analyses for ali shapes
rather than outlines, and we can't imagine them having the audacity to charge us for that !