There is a bias amongst some popular music academics. They
are for musicians and they are against songwriters. This is not borne out of a need to venerate the
incredible playing ability of certain artists, quite the opposite in fact. The
desire is to move away from the idea of ‘artists’. Musicians can be viewed as
workers. Theirs is a job of honest graft. In contrast, it is songwriters who
carry with them the bourgeois notion of the creative genius, operating at a
remove from society. This viewpoint is made clear in a recent call for papers
for a ‘Working in Music’ conference:
As with any artistic
production, music is also - and perhaps mainly - work. Such an idea is opposed
to the romantic mythology from the 19th Century which conceives of artistic
activity as coming from transcendental inspiration, impossible to rationalize,
and of the artist as an exceptional being whose ‘talent’ would be irreducible
to sociological analysis.
What we should value is the work (the physical
effort that is expended in making music) and not ‘the work’ (the musical
product that is credited to an author). Christopher Small, with his neologism
‘musicking’ is key to this notion. He believes that we should think of music as
a process - and thus a verb - rather than as an object - get rid of that noun!
To
music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by
performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material
for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times
even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at
the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who
set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean
up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature
of the event that is a musical performance.
I’m in agreement with much of this. Music is social; we
should take genius down a peg or two; songwriting should not be placed above
performance in the musical hierarchy. This outlook generates some questionable claims,
however.
First,
there is the idea that the practice of musicians is out of step with the legal
and commercial perceptions of music. Simon Frith has recently argued that ‘The law treats music as a work, a commodity,
intellectual property, something that can be owned and exploited’, whereas ‘Musicians
think of music as a process’.
But do they always think in this manner? The recording industry may have
declined in recent years, but the goal for many musicians is still to make a
recording. They also want to have credit for it. These musicians do think
of music as a noun. Frith once described the process of popular music as resulting in an
object:
The ‘industrialization of music’
can’t be understood as something that happens to music but describes a process in which music itself is made – a
process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical
arguments. Twentieth Century popular music means the twentieth century popular
record; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) which
exists independently of the music industry, but a form of communication which
determines what songs, singers, and performances are and can be.
I would argue that this still remains the case, regardless
of the academic vogue for musicking.
Second,
there is the desire to conflate music-making processes. It is argued that the
division of labour into composition and performance is a classical music
conceit. Popular music, in contrast, witnesses a confusion of these roles.
Musicians compose as they are playing; songs are produced communally. Frith stresses
this point in his recent article, stating that ‘The
law assumes music is authored, created by named individuals’, whereas ‘Musicians
know that music making is an essentially collaborative, a social process
[sic]’.
Music
making is certainly collaborative and the divisions between composition and
performance can be blurred. This does not mean, however, that they are the same
thing. Few popular music songs are notated, but most of them are written. This is most obviously true
of the lyrics. The words are honed and they are crafted, and it is usually an
individual who does this. It is also true of the music: chords and melodies are
usually developed by individuals or by small teams of writers; they seldom emerge
whole during the rehearsal process.
There
is, of course, the question of whether the chords and melody should be valued
above other elements of music, such as rhythm and the timbre. Frith believes
not. He argues that ‘The law describes music in terms of notes and tunes’,
whereas ‘Musicians think of music in terms of sounds and textures’. Again, though, do all musicians think in
this way? There are a lot of performers who still believe in songs, and there
are many who believe (perhaps conservatively) that lyrics, melody and
harmony should be given greatest compositional accord.
The idea that performance and
composition take place simultaneously is in some ways outdated. It harks back
to the idea of the rock group: a band of musicians who work up their material
in rehearsal or in the recording studio. This is not modern practice. Most
contemporary hit records are made by solo artists or by collaborations between
solo artists. These musicians usually have a hand in writing their songs, but they
do not write them on their own. We live in an era of professional songwriters.
Their job is to work on the notes and tunes. It is somebody else’s job to work
on the performance.
There is, however, one modern
example where the lines between performance, composition and recording are
truly blurred. This is the lone, electronic artist who writes, edits and
records their material on a digital audio workstation. Ironically, this type of
music making is the least social or collaborative of all.
Finally, we come to attempts to
solve the legal dilemma. If the law is an ass when it comes to performers, how
do we make it into something better? One proposal that has been put forward is
to regard performance as composition. Richard Arnold has argued for this.
He believes that ‘in the field of popular music many works are created
in performance rather than being written down first’. Lionel Bently’s solution
is to forgo the conventional compositional copyright for popular music and
instead have a copyright in the ‘original work of sound’:
The effect of this
would be to save copyright law from being asked to invent ‘musical works’ (and,
indeed, ‘performances’) in circumstances (as in much of rock and pop – but not
all) where the musical artefact is created in the recording studio (and
subsequently marketed, appreciated and consumed) by way of such recording.
This idea is problematic in two respects. First of
all, it ignores the fact that many songs are not written by the recording artists. As noted above, it is rare
today for hit songs to be worked up in a studio like this. Bently’s idea is
also unworkable in respect of cover versions: artists whose songs have been
covered are not likely to welcome the covering artists as co-composers. The
second problem with this proposal is that it posits composition as the desired
musical goal. Copyright will give due respect to performers, but only if they cast
themselves as writers. Isn’t this where we came in?
