Mike Batt, the British composer and producer behind such crossover successes as
violinist Vanessa Mae and Bond, the photogenic string quartet, has discovered
that silence doesn't come cheap.
For the debut album by The Planets, a group of eight handsome young men and women wearing snug black outfits, Batt composed variations on several classical staples, including Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Debussy's Claire de Lune. He also included a silent track, titled "A One Minute Silence." In a nod to John Cage's silent 4'33'', Batt listed the composers as "Batt/Cage."
The credit was "just for a laugh," Batt told the London Independent last week, but he has received a letter on behalf of Cage's publisher, demanding royalties. The silent track, the paper reported, had "enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer."
"My silence is original silence," Batt complained, "not a quotation from his silence."
Asked for comment, Gene Caprioglio, a representative of Cage's American publisher, C.F. Peters, chuckled. After checking with C.F. Peter's London office, Caprioglio explained that the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), the British organization that collects royalties for composers and publishers, had sent its standard license form to Batt. Since "A One Minute Silence" listed Cage as a composer, the group had billed the producer for the track. No one had sent a letter, enraged or otherwise.
"The article tries to make us sound ridiculous for taking this position," Caprioglio said, "but Batt [was the one who] listed Cage as the composer."
As it happens, "A One Minute Silence" runs some three
minutes shorter than 4'33", but Caprioglio noted that Cage's instructions allow his
piece to be of any length. Batt had used Cage's name for "obvious reasons,"
Caprioglio said — to evoke Cage's provocative 1952 composition. "If Mr. Batt
wants to produce a minute of silence under his own name," he conceded, "we would
obviously have no right to the royalties."
