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.

Creativity, Innovation and Labour in Music
A symposium

Monday June 22nd – symposium, 9.30 – 5.00
Tuesday June 23rd – workshop on developing a network, 9.30 – 11.30

The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Central Meeting Rooms

Organisers
Dot Miell, Mark Doffman, Mark Banks, Jason Toynbee, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open
University
Raymond MacDonald, Department of Psychology, Glasgow Caledonian University

Interdisciplinary research into music at the intersection of creativity, innovation and labour is an
emerging topic that presents many challenges for researchers. For example:

• the theme of labour calls attention to musical work, economic exploitation and the everyday
processes of music making,

• innovation takes in the problem of the nature of the new in different genres, but also
questions of how musical innovation gets evaluated, rewarded or ignored,

• and creativity gestures towards issues of origination and emergence, artifice and authenticity,
the individual and the collective.

This symposium brings together experts from across the disciplines in order to develop a more
coherent analysis of how these themes converge. The format consists of a series of presentations
each followed by discussion with the aim of advancing our understanding of the topic, and
establishing an informal research network to take things forward – a workshop on the Tuesday
morning is to plan next steps.

Speakers
Martin Cloonan, Glasgow University – Creating live music: an industrial perspective

Don Knox, Glasgow Caledonian University – Who are we innovating for? The need for
interdisciplinary input in setting goals for music information retrieval

Bennett Hogg, University of Newcastle – Working through the new

Fabian Holt, University of Roskilde – Creativity and innovation in contemporary live music
production

Matt Stahl, University of Western Ontario – Recording artists, employment, domination and
democratization