SILENCE IS BEHOLDEN.(alleged copyright infringement of composer John Cage's work in impresario Mike Batt's production of music recording Classical Graffiti)(Brief Article)

Mike Batt is Britain's premier impresario of crossover classical music, having orchestrated the careers of such stars as Vanessa-Mae (a sexy Thai-Chinese violinist), Bond (a sexy four-piece multiethnic classical group), and the Planets (a sexy eight-piece multiethnic classical group). But many people still think of him as the musical muscle behind "The Wombles," a mid-seventies television series that featured a group of fuzzy, singing creatures who picked up trash from city streets, put it into "tidy bags," and reused it in creative ways. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Batt recently did some recycling himself, though with results that were far from tidy.

On the Planets' debut album, "Classical Graffiti," which was released this year in England and will reach American stores early in 2003, Batt needed a way to set off the CD's twelve proper tracks from four remixes. He introduced a one-minute silence as a divider, titled it "A One Minute Silence," in homage to one of the most famous modernist works of the twentieth century--John Cage's "4' 33"," an entirely silent piece, composed in 1952--and credited the track to "Batt/Cage." "But not John Cage," he said the other day. "This was someone named Clint Cage that I registered as a pseudonym."

Everything was going according to plan. The Planets, like Bond and Vanessa-Mae before them, were a resounding commercial success. "Then one day, after the record had been on the charts for two months, I was sitting with my mother on our patio," Batt said. "My secretary brought in a letter from the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, or the M.C.P.S., whose job it is to collect and forward royalties. It informed me that my silence was a copyright infringement on Cage's silence." The letter went on to say that an initial payment of more than four hundred pounds had been made to Peters Edition, the music-publishing company that administers the Cage catalogue. (Cage died in 1992.)

Batt, whose high-profile projects have been widely pilloried by classical-music critics, has learned how to respond to such developments. "I roared with laughter," he said. But the letter wasn't a joke. "We have to protect Cage and his ideas," Nicholas Riddle, the managing director of ...