Thanks for clicking on this post. Here's your answer until I decide otherwise: FIFTEEN MINUTES. SPEED DATING TONIGHT! is protected by grand rights licensing. That means you can't do it with staging unless you've contacted me and I say you can. Even if you have the pdf of the whole thing. So what I'm saying here is if you want to do up to fifteen minutes of the show, go ahead without contacting me.
The good news is that you can download a perusal copy and it will cost you nothing. Why? I'm the composer and librettist and publisher so I get to decide if that is ok or not. And I believe that for a composer, "the big problem isn't piracy, its obscurity." (Tim O'Reilly via Cory Doctorow) I want you to do an excerpt and have that make you want to do the whole thing, so you can get the satisfying arc and closure that you'd get from a full production and then I get a fee. Plenty of folks are deciding to do the whole show and I want you to join them.
So go ahead and do your fifteen minutes of favorite pieces of SDT!. There is a small catch--the perusal score doesn't have every version of every song in it, so if you want that fifteen minute excerpt in a certain key range, unless you are lucky, you're going to have to contact me and let me sell you the versions you need. I will charge you for those, cause of the time involved.
Here's a further explanation of grand rights licensing. It's what a traditional publisher like Boosey and Hawkes might do, or a licensing organization like MTI or Tams-Witmark. But in this digital age, it's gotten simple enough for business minded creators to do it themselves. I love the fact that SPEED DATING TONIGHT! has filled a niche implicit in opera production--shows that fit available personnel. It's kind of how the composers in the 18th century wrote works that showed off the particular singers available at an opera house. But it would have been a pain to do on any scale before computer music notation and things like pdfs made information so easy to share.
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