If you’ve been following the gossip, you may have heard that a university recently performed “Asphalt Cocktail” without renting the materials, having obtained the materials from a third party.  There has been a lot of speculation about what school it might be that would perform a rental piece without renting it.  Although I will not “out” the school — they’re in the process of making this right, and I’m optimistic that they will, as this was hopefully just a paperwork misunderstanding somewhere along the line  — I also don’t want this to become a witch hunt.  This circumstance is, thankfully, very unusual.  Nearly every school respects the law and does the right thing.  I will say, if you visit the Performance List on this site, and you see a performance listed, that school is free and clear to give that performance.  Even if a performance isn’t listed, it may just mean that I failed to enter it into the database.  (I only list performances of rental works, not sale works like Undertow or Strange Humors, and I even forget to enter some rental performances, so even if they aren’t listed, the likelihood is that they’ve done nothing wrong, but a listed performance is, definitively, a licensed performance.)

So please don’t email band directors all over the place asking if it was them.  It wasn’t them.