Beyond the Term 'Music'Developed from an American Anthropological Association conference paper
23 November, 2002
Introduction
My primary research field of 'music and copyright' is in serious need of new perspectives.
This increasingly contentious, and increasingly bizarre, area of study has,
to a large extent, stagnated in and around issues of access, control, and ownership,
claim and counterclaim. This is hardly surprising insofar as academic discussions have
been unduly weighted by the privileged primacy of propertized legal perspectives.
Legal perspectives have been dominated in turn by increasing segmentation with
regard to the statutory definition, categorization, and characterization of copyright and
'neighboring' or 'related' rights, such as performing, mechanical, and, more recently,
moral and performers' rights. Research, then, has been dominated by the analysis and
exegesis of litigation.
The controversies over access, control, and ownership that saturate 'music and copyright'
litigation are, in turn, suffused with legal, economic, and literary orthodoxies of property,
rights, public and private space and public and private interest, utility, consumption,
production, incentives, possessive individualism, authorship, originality, creativity,
freedom, and progress. In this maelstrom of mutually-reinforcing discourses, access,
control, and ownership have continued to provide the central areas of focus both for
the study and practice of copyright law, and for related endeavors of scholarly analysis.
"Who owns the music?" has become the prime question, with "What are we allowed to do with
the music?" coming a close second. Scholarly debate seems to have stalled as a series of
descriptive discussions about the management of resources rather than tending towards
explanatory approaches that might understand intellectual property within the broader
qualitative, social, and emotional dimensions of life. In my work I have been attempting to
address this lack. I have been trying to understand and explain the expansionary character
of the discourses and practices of intellectual property. I have been trying to understand
the difference that intellectual property makes to the way we live our lives, by developing
a theory of enclosure, where enclosure is understood not in relation to the commons,
but as a particular character of social relations.
'Eh … no music-ology'
I have been doing this work within the field of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology is often
stereotypically perceived and presented as 'the study of non-Western musics', and has often
been characterized in opposition or at least in contradistinction to musicology. Most
importantly here, though, instead of just looking at 'the music itself', proponents of
ethnomusicology often try to put people back in the picture, adding, for example,
anthropological techniques of fieldwork, participant-observation and ethnography to sonic
analysis. Ethnomusicology, then, might be said to focus on the study of 'music in or as culture',
'people making music', or 'humanly-organized sound', incorporating the study of sonic form,
the study of discourses of 'music' or 'music-making', and the study of social practices
associated with those sonic forms and discourses. As with any field, however, scholars
who participate in the disciplinary maintenance of ethnomusicology run the gamut from
abstract, universalizing and structuralist formalism to a commitment to politically-engaged,
transformative, experiential particularism. In 1979 the ethnomusicologist George List said,
for example that:
The field of study known as ethnomusicology has expanded so rapidly that it now encompasses
almost any type of human activity that conceivably can be related in some manner to what may
be termed music. The data and methods used are derived from many disciplines found in the arts,
the humanities, the social sciences, and the physical sciences. The variety of philosophies,
approaches, and methods utilized is enormous. It is impossible to encompass them all within
one definition (cited in Myers, ed. 1992:14).
In the course of my work as an ethnomusicologist specializing in music and copyright,
however, I have found, somewhat ironically, that perhaps the term 'music' may not be
especially helpful as a basic analytic category in my analyses.
The term 'music' is such a commonplace that it seems natural, and inevitable, that it be
used as a category for analysis in ethnomusicology. It seems to be understood that we know
what it is that we are referring to when we use the word, that there is "a cultural phenomenon
called "music"" (Wallis and Malm 1984). There are innumerable books, recordings, classes,
and conferences to support such a claim. Like those in the fields of musicology and
ethnomusicology, those who participate in the discourses of the law, economics,
intellectual property, and copyright also presume that there is such a thing as "music".
There is nothing in our experiences of the music industry, technologies, music education,
concert performance, and aesthetic appreciation to suggest otherwise, it is assumed.
Surely we can see 'music'? Surely we can hear 'music'?
I'm not so sure, and I'm not so sure we haven't been flogging a dead horse for centuries.
What if there isn't a 'thing' called music? What if our acceptance of the enclosed and
enclosing abstraction of a singular category of "music" is counterproductive to
ethnomusicologists' research concerns, at least those weighted towards the disciplines of
anthropology and sociology? What if we are able to analyze 'music' because we set out to
analyze 'music', and classify, separate, and differentiate in ways which justify our analysis
and satisfy our curiosity - as Foucault puts it, systematically forming the object of which we
speak (1972:49). Many people have a lot of power and status invested in and justified by
the presumption of the existence of 'music' as a universal phenomenon. To paraphrase Foucault,
however: "... it is precisely this idea of [music] in itself that we cannot accept without
examination" (1990:152).
The rest of the article can found
here.
