*splat*

Exam had good bits and not-so-good bits; head of Brass and Julian Baker (my old teacher, and the external examiner) were both positive about it, so I don't think I failed or anything drastic like that.

I'll do a proper taking-apart analysis at some later date.

Now I am taking a break from practising until at least Wednesday afternoon (have a rehearsal Wednesday evening and it would be good to be warmed up when I get there). Instead I shall be mostly tidying my room.

Copyright question

I own the Schott edition of the Jenner trio for Piano, Clarinet and Horn. This edition is edited by Horst Heussner and is copyright B. Schott's Sohne, Mainz, 1990.

Jenner died in 1920: his work is no longer in copyright. That whole 70-years-after-the-death-of-the-composer thing suggests that Schott weren't able to publish until 1990, but how did they get hold of it?

Am I legally allowed to re-typeset this music? The big problem I can see is that there is no way to tell which markings are Heussner and which are original.

I very much doubt I can get hold of an earlier edition: this one was difficult enough to find. If Schott own it they certainly aren't going to let me have a peek. The Preface says that an early copy passed from the ownership of Mandyczewski to the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreude in Wien, but doesn't say where they got their later edition from (presumably Jenner himself sent it to Brietkopf & Hartel at some point, as he'd sent them an earlier version as well).

This is very sad: a lovely piece of music which is difficult to get hold of by traditional means is virtually unheard of (neither my current horn teacher nor my old teacher, Julian Baker, had any idea of the existence of the piece before I told them), the composer certainly doesn't stand to benefit and the work should be out of copyright, but I see no straightforward way to make a public domain edition available. It isn't that I don't think the editor should be paid for editing, or the typesetter for typesetting: doing these things well does take skill. I do wonder, though, how much of the editing was simply a matter of copying down exactly what was in the manuscript to begin with. If Jenner was anything like Brahms (who wrote down every meticulous detail) then there wasn't much to be done there. And while doing a better job myself on the typesetting is a tall order that I won't be able to fill anytime soon, I'd like to be able to have a crack at it, particularly given that there are some badly-crowded passages in the piano part I have.

There are practical considerations, as well. Foolishly I only ordered one copy of the music (at 57.15 EUR each there is good reason), but in the past I've played in chamber groups and had people not return parts to me. That gets expensive, and extremely annoying. At the moment there are two different groups I want to play this with, but me keeping control of all parts between rehearsals is completely unrealistic: they need to take them away and learn them. But I can't photocopy what I've got because it isn't legal to do so, even if there is no profit involved. In theory I should be getting four more people to buy their own copies, but that takes time and is rather silly. And no, it isn't in the Trinity library, or the Alan Cave chamber music collection, or anywhere else in London that I've been able to look.

I sort of hope that when IMSLP comes back in July I find that the Jenner is already in there. There is nothing by Jenner in MusOpen, or in the Werner Icking Music Archive, or in the Mutopia Project, but they're all smaller than IMSLP was.

Non-Stick

I have a Le Creuset frying pan. It is small-ish (20cm diameter) and completely made of cast-iron; I got it in a charity shop for about a fiver, which is pretty good for something that costs considerably more in shops.

It has non-stick coating on it, and the coating was starting to come off which I assume is why it was in the charity shop.

I have been trying to remove the rest of the non-stick, using a variety of scouring brushes and so on. Being Le Creuset, it's not been giving up easily; I don't know what they must have done to it to get it to the state it was in when I bought it.

Today I tried sandpaper, and that seems to work best so far, but it's going to take a very long time and an awful lot of sandpaper to get anywhere with this.

I've considered some sort of electric sander, but this would be no good for the curved edges of the pan, and these make up more area than the flat bottom.

Is there a chemical thing that can do this? Should I buy a can of Brasso and give it a try, or will it not work on iron? Now I've got through some of it, is it worth leaving it wet somewhere to see if I can rust the surface a little, or will that just wreck it entirely? Is there possibly some sort of tool that can just, I don't know, blast sand at a surface until all the non-stick comes off, and does anyone have one I can borrow?