Folk Memories
Pop music is essentially a kind of "fashion". It is seldom more than pastiche or a knock-off of something else. Listen to what the critics say about the best pop music in 2013 and it sounds like last year or even 10 years ago.
Pastiche isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's actually kind of "folky". And the only way to make music accessible is to make it sound like something that already exists. Sometimes it exists only as a "folk memory". [1]
Quite often knockoffs or remixes improve on the initial ideas as they become more refined on a rewrite. (The "children" are usually better than the "parents".)
If directly compared, a directly plagiarized work should be immediately identifiable, like overlaying two slightly transparent works and seeing only one image. This certainly wouldn't be the case in this example:
There's nothing particularly unique about Taurus. The chord sequence in both songs use standard functional harmony, with a descending bass line emerging form chord inversions--a sound baked into western music.
Stairway to Heaven supposedly was a ripoff of Taurus, but was really more of a knockoff that nicely improved It.
Very often works are created seemingly as completely unique objects, when in fact they are created in a 'delayed borrowing' where just enough time has passed between seeing or hearing something and making something inspired by it, that the artist believes that it is a unique singular event, that they came up with it.
Andy Warhol's "Sleep" film (1963) was believed to have been inspired by the performance of Erik Satie's Vexations (1893) which consisted of playing a short piano theme 840 times, performed in a series of relays. But it is not certain that Warhol was even at that performance.
John Cage:
"In September, 1963, we had ten pianists play one of Satie's Vexations in relays, including me and one music critic who thought he could play the piece and wanted to get in the act... I hadn't realized that Andy was there. But even if he wasn't, it doesn't surprise me that his work followed the same lines. Of course, artists are encouraged by other things that happen, but mostly by what is either in the air or already inside them."
Another example of a "folk memory":
The first drafts of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" were apparently inspired by the Bee Gee's first hit "New York Mining Disaster 1941". [2]
More often than not the copy improves the original, removing the rough edges in the first version, and making the ideas stronger. (If artists don't do preliminary studies of new works, society may in fact do it for them.)
Right to copy
Where inspiration and imitation or emulation stop are where property rights begin. There is creative behavior as artistic expression, and then there is the polar opposite of creative behavior controlled by rules. Both have proven to have resulted in the most revered works in art history. Freely allowing works to be transformed can be the best thing for intellectual property. The reconciliation of creativity and capitalism will always have this continuous "tectonic" activity shaking the ground underneath and forming new landscapes.
Arguably creativity would die if not continually recharged through imitation and borrowing. But how could we figure out how much borrowing is worth, and who can claim ownership writ large for ideas when they are recycled to the point of anonymity or relegated to folk memory? The shadows of doubt will never completely disappear as long as the law shines a light on them.
The act of imitation also raises fundamental questions about good-faith and bad-faith borrowing. Good faith is by emulation and reverence for the content and context, bad-faith by parody and context. Either one should be fairly obvious.
Here are three examples of appropriated images that appear to have been done in good faith, at least initially:
To see them as theft is absurd because none of them had the intent to be commodified. Even the Warhol, now worth tens of millions had good intentions. They were all clearly reverent and game for fair use.
If we naturally create through emulation and imitation (in good faith), where can there be room for a claim for property rights? Surely there must be, but sometimes pastiche is ultimately more successful, both as a way to refine existing works and to find a profit model. By-and-large, knocking things off are good for the music "industry", i.e. the production of pieces of music, but not the profit model. It's pretty clear at this point that there isn't one, and one needs to be made--through the knockoff.
Any musicological aspects that may be the deciding factor in determining whether copyright has been violated are extremely moot. Firstly because chords and melodies used in pop music are decidedly common, and secondly, the primacy of melody and harmony as compositional elements have become virtually extinct in current pop music. Melody does not have much intrinsic value because it isn't used as a primary compositional device. But it can still move us emotionally--so much that it gets rolled into new compositions through sampled recordings.
The real challenge is to make work completely unique and different but it would be everyone's guess that resemblance will always win over novelty. Folk memories can only be created from elements being copied and repeated to the point where attribution becomes unknown and ultimately becomes public domain, at least in essence.
***
1. Stravinsky acknowledged that the opening bassoon melody in The Rite of Spring was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, but maintained that this was his only borrowing from such sources. If other elements sounded like aboriginal folk music, he said, it was due to "some unconscious 'folk' memory". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Spring
2. Doggett, Peter (2012-07-31). The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s (Kindle Locations 1063-1067). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Pastiche isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's actually kind of "folky". And the only way to make music accessible is to make it sound like something that already exists. Sometimes it exists only as a "folk memory". [1]
Quite often knockoffs or remixes improve on the initial ideas as they become more refined on a rewrite. (The "children" are usually better than the "parents".)
If directly compared, a directly plagiarized work should be immediately identifiable, like overlaying two slightly transparent works and seeing only one image. This certainly wouldn't be the case in this example:
There's nothing particularly unique about Taurus. The chord sequence in both songs use standard functional harmony, with a descending bass line emerging form chord inversions--a sound baked into western music.
Stairway to Heaven supposedly was a ripoff of Taurus, but was really more of a knockoff that nicely improved It.
Very often works are created seemingly as completely unique objects, when in fact they are created in a 'delayed borrowing' where just enough time has passed between seeing or hearing something and making something inspired by it, that the artist believes that it is a unique singular event, that they came up with it.
Andy Warhol's "Sleep" film (1963) was believed to have been inspired by the performance of Erik Satie's Vexations (1893) which consisted of playing a short piano theme 840 times, performed in a series of relays. But it is not certain that Warhol was even at that performance.
John Cage:
"In September, 1963, we had ten pianists play one of Satie's Vexations in relays, including me and one music critic who thought he could play the piece and wanted to get in the act... I hadn't realized that Andy was there. But even if he wasn't, it doesn't surprise me that his work followed the same lines. Of course, artists are encouraged by other things that happen, but mostly by what is either in the air or already inside them."
Another example of a "folk memory":
The first drafts of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" were apparently inspired by the Bee Gee's first hit "New York Mining Disaster 1941". [2]
More often than not the copy improves the original, removing the rough edges in the first version, and making the ideas stronger. (If artists don't do preliminary studies of new works, society may in fact do it for them.)
Right to copy
Where inspiration and imitation or emulation stop are where property rights begin. There is creative behavior as artistic expression, and then there is the polar opposite of creative behavior controlled by rules. Both have proven to have resulted in the most revered works in art history. Freely allowing works to be transformed can be the best thing for intellectual property. The reconciliation of creativity and capitalism will always have this continuous "tectonic" activity shaking the ground underneath and forming new landscapes.
Arguably creativity would die if not continually recharged through imitation and borrowing. But how could we figure out how much borrowing is worth, and who can claim ownership writ large for ideas when they are recycled to the point of anonymity or relegated to folk memory? The shadows of doubt will never completely disappear as long as the law shines a light on them.
The act of imitation also raises fundamental questions about good-faith and bad-faith borrowing. Good faith is by emulation and reverence for the content and context, bad-faith by parody and context. Either one should be fairly obvious.
Here are three examples of appropriated images that appear to have been done in good faith, at least initially:
To see them as theft is absurd because none of them had the intent to be commodified. Even the Warhol, now worth tens of millions had good intentions. They were all clearly reverent and game for fair use.
If we naturally create through emulation and imitation (in good faith), where can there be room for a claim for property rights? Surely there must be, but sometimes pastiche is ultimately more successful, both as a way to refine existing works and to find a profit model. By-and-large, knocking things off are good for the music "industry", i.e. the production of pieces of music, but not the profit model. It's pretty clear at this point that there isn't one, and one needs to be made--through the knockoff.
Any musicological aspects that may be the deciding factor in determining whether copyright has been violated are extremely moot. Firstly because chords and melodies used in pop music are decidedly common, and secondly, the primacy of melody and harmony as compositional elements have become virtually extinct in current pop music. Melody does not have much intrinsic value because it isn't used as a primary compositional device. But it can still move us emotionally--so much that it gets rolled into new compositions through sampled recordings.
The real challenge is to make work completely unique and different but it would be everyone's guess that resemblance will always win over novelty. Folk memories can only be created from elements being copied and repeated to the point where attribution becomes unknown and ultimately becomes public domain, at least in essence.
***
1. Stravinsky acknowledged that the opening bassoon melody in The Rite of Spring was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, but maintained that this was his only borrowing from such sources. If other elements sounded like aboriginal folk music, he said, it was due to "some unconscious 'folk' memory". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Spring
2. Doggett, Peter (2012-07-31). The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s (Kindle Locations 1063-1067). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
