What Is Art For? – Lewis Hyde – Profile (from NYTimes.com):

Excerpt: For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways. Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.

Read the full article here.

Lawrence Lessig discusses the Google Book Search decision. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine the parallels to recorded music. Except to say that Google isn’t even attempting to do this with recorded music…

Techdirt ran an interesting post recently about The Myth of Original Creators. In it, they explored the Romantic Era notion of the artist as the sole creative participant in a work.

And when I say ‘Romantic Era’, think Beethoven. He was the poster child for art as unique ‘self expression’ rather than art as contributing participant in a cultural dialogue with antecedents and referents.

I’m not saying Beethoven was deluded – and nor that his genius is diminished if I claim that no work is wholly original – but simply that he was making an assertion about his art that has captured the imagination, and which largely remains as the basis of our music copyright law.

But music – especially popular music – is part of a cultural conversation.

The piracy of Elvis
Peter Friedman, the law professor whose blog is quoted in the Techdirt article, cites the case of Robert Johnson. As he points out, Robert Johnson didn’t sell his soul – he just listened to what was going on around him, developed some ideas and was recorded.

In other words, he was no more the ‘originator of the blues’ than Elvis was the ‘inventor’ of rock and roll.

Both men took elements around them, engaged in the conversation, and fashioned those elements into something that had not previously existed in that way. Nobody’s denying the creativity or genius that goes into it – just that these things don’t happen in a vacuum.

And you can’t bake a cake without ingredients.

The locked ingredient cupboard
Unfortunately, because of the power of that Romantic notion of the lone genius and the fact that it’s been crystallised in copyright law – which, for interests with which we are now entirely familiar, enforces the myth of original creators – most of the ingredients from which we could make more popular music culture are locked away in vaults.

Tapes, mostly – and they’re decaying rapidly. Most of them will never see the light of day for the simple reason that the corporate owners of those vaults cannot imagine a way in which investing in releasing and ensuring the availability of those works will turn a profit.

And since music is, for them, purely a commercial interest, the cultural, communicative and ‘conversational’ component – and the potential value of those works as springboards into other, possibly significant cultural works – is entirely overlooked.

For that reason, the ideal of musical composition as solely an artistic, cathartic and personal endeavour that is simply an expression of the creative outpouring of the artist – and which may or may not be shared with an audience – is problematic.

Not only does it (inadvertently, perhaps – but inescapably) serve the exclusive corporate interests of the ‘music purely as commerce’ brigade, but it also denies the very real fact that music is culture – and that the seemingly inevitable disappearance of that culture is not only tragic but, because it is entirely avoidable, criminal.

Music as Lone Works of Genius vs Music as Culture
Put simply, copyright law assumes that creative works are either wholly original, or they represent theft. That idea is nonsensical, because no works are wholly original. Because significant corporate interests are based on that framework, works that are under copyright but which are not commercially viable are dead works – stolen away and left to rot.

This stolen past – conservatively estimated in the region of 90% of all recordings ever released – could seed a massive, profound and important shift in popular music culture – like the birth of the blues or the genesis of rock and roll. Or it might just inspire a few good dance tunes. We just don’t know.

But what we can be certain about is that our stolen musical heritage cannot hope to contribute to culture where it is now – and that’s important.

By ‘music programming’, incidentally, I don’t mean in the sense of programming beats or using sequencers. I mean it in the radio sense of selecting and putting together a series of songs in a particular order. That is, a playlist.

The module is part of the radio curriculum, but I encourage music industries students to study it as well. It’s about the way in which music creates meaning – not just in and of itself, but when arranged into a narrative over time.

We discuss musical genre, musicological features, instrumentation and the fact that the meanings we associate with pieces of music are frequently distinct from their author’s original intention. Jazz, for instance, is often used to conjure notions of sophistication and class, when their original contexts and meanings were often political, popularist or counter-cultural.

In order to effectively teach these concepts, it’s necessary for students to create their own compilations that respond to a brief. Assemble a short collection of music that would make sense as a soundtrack for a romantic comedy. Or that would suit being played in a bar on Broad Street. Or a skate shop. Or throughout a TV gardening programme. Or a science-fiction first person shooter computer game.

They collect pieces of music that include specific instruments and think about the connotations of the sound of those instruments. What does a banjo ‘mean’? A vibraphone? Steel drums? Pipe organ? Theremin?

The students are also challenged to research unfamiliar genres – from Zydeco to Grime, Bebop to Death Metal – and come up with playlists that would be meaningful to fans of those genres. And they’re also encouraged to think about how a selection of songs would make sense to a niche audience within a specific geographic area – as you might do if you were programming music for a radio station.

Of course, peer feedback is important – so swapping those compilations and playlists among their fellow students is important, so that what one student learns can be transferred, listened to, reflected upon and developed among classmates.

Naturally, the best way to do this is through a combination of blank CDs, filesharing websites, mp3 blogs, and other people’s record collections. This is not something that would have been quite so possible even ten years ago. And the potential for the study of musical texts in this way is quite exciting.

Sadly, none of this seems to fall within the parameters of fair dealing.

Lucky we don’t authorise or condone anything like that.

Sound Property? Investigating the Legal Status of Sound Recordings
An Interdisciplinary Conference on Music & Copyright
University of Salford ~ May 28-29, 2009

This conference proposes to investigate the current U.S. and U.K. statutes that regulate the protection of sound recordings. It will inquire to what degree those laws secure the rights of both the owners and creators of the music contained on these products as well as determine their impact upon those who consume and comment upon this material. The pending efforts to universalize an extended term of copyright underscore the potential for even more draconian controls upon recorded music. Will the public, creators, and commentators continue to be able to acquire, appreciate and appropriate musical materials? Can some balance be found between the need for profit and the pursuit of pleasure? Is it possible in a civil society for music effectively to be silenced through constraints over its recorded legacy?

Keynote Speakers Include:

Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge. Music: A Very Short Introduction & Music, Imagination & Culture

Simon Frith, University of Edinburgh Taking Popular Music Seriously; Sound Effects; Editor, Music & Copyright

Kembrew McLeod, University of Iowa Freedom of Expression: Resistance & Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property; Owning Culture: Ownership, Authorship & Intellectual Property

Further details at:
http://www.adelphi.salford.ac.uk/adelphi/p/?s=23&pid=90

Apart from anything else, I’m really hoping to interview Simon Frith for the Deleting Music book. He wrote a very good book called Music and Copyright and will, I’m sure, have a good deal of insight into the relationship between copyright and music as culture.

However, it’s on the 28th & 29th of May, and there are two other places I’m meant to be on those days. We’ll see how we get on. At any rate, I’ll do my best to get hold of Simon. He’s on the list.

Mind you – the list has 64 names on it, and only one of them has been crossed off so far. And I keep adding more. Still – we’re only just starting.