PUBLIC OWNERSHIP/PUBLIC DOMAIN/SHARED LABOUR/BOOTLEGGING/MINIMALIST CHORAL MUSICJOHN ADAMS/JULIUS EASTMAN
As musicians we are always considering the relationship between labour and ownership. Should we have rights (or ownership of) the music that we perform and we arrange if the songs still technically belong in the public domain? How much must one change something before it becomes yours? It is freeing to think of all music as belonging to everybody (or where labour=ownership) but in the digital age especially, there are loopholes in which large corporations profit from the labour of musicians and most musicians now will therefore never be able to make a living from their creative practice. My peers and I in the sphere of traditional music (and experimental folk music) have discussed often the fact that we don’t feel as if we are owed a living from what we believe should be a part of everyday life for everybody.
Folk music should have no ownership, it belongs in the public domain. This is inherently linked to the idea of Bootlegging – is bootlegging a creative right? What is bootlegging and what is stealing? Bootlegging can be a method – a highly accessible method that allows people (no matter their creative/artistic/academic training) to dismantle something and reproduce it in a way that better serves them. It allows you to enter something and break it apart from the inside, nothing has to be created from scratch. When we think of music that belongs in the public domain we imagine old Irish ballads in pub sessions or hymns but this idea exists in every place.
One of my first thoughts when learning about bootlegging in design was of choral music and the way in which a composer takes a pre-existing poem and re-imagines it as a grand symphony. One might think of the religious examples first, of Latin bible text becoming grand symphonic masses, but this happening in the secular world is closer to my definition of Bootlegging*. In his minimalist symphony Harmonium (Common Tones in Simple Time for orchestra, Shaker Loops for strings and Phrygian Gates for piano) John Adams sets to music the text of John Donne poem ‘Negative Love’ – due to its age this poem belongs officially in the public domain. This use of public domain material in classical (specifically contemporary/secular/ minimalist) music does not require words, one can ‘bootleg’ (in the most positive sense) a melody, springing out from nowhere in a way that almost forms the words automatically in your mind as in Julius Eastman’s Femenine No.8 Be Thou My Vision (Mao Melodies) where all of a sudden appears a single verse of the famous hymn ‘Lord of All Hopefulness’ – a tune which (as far as I know) was originally bootlegged from the Irish ballad The Lovely Bann Water. Bootlegging is constant and infinite and will exist forever and therefore we must use it for our own means, a tool for the disintegration of the hegemonic systems that hold us.
*illegally make, copy, or sell something
Folk music should have no ownership, it belongs in the public domain. This is inherently linked to the idea of Bootlegging – is bootlegging a creative right? What is bootlegging and what is stealing? Bootlegging can be a method – a highly accessible method that allows people (no matter their creative/artistic/academic training) to dismantle something and reproduce it in a way that better serves them. It allows you to enter something and break it apart from the inside, nothing has to be created from scratch. When we think of music that belongs in the public domain we imagine old Irish ballads in pub sessions or hymns but this idea exists in every place.
One of my first thoughts when learning about bootlegging in design was of choral music and the way in which a composer takes a pre-existing poem and re-imagines it as a grand symphony. One might think of the religious examples first, of Latin bible text becoming grand symphonic masses, but this happening in the secular world is closer to my definition of Bootlegging*. In his minimalist symphony Harmonium (Common Tones in Simple Time for orchestra, Shaker Loops for strings and Phrygian Gates for piano) John Adams sets to music the text of John Donne poem ‘Negative Love’ – due to its age this poem belongs officially in the public domain. This use of public domain material in classical (specifically contemporary/secular/ minimalist) music does not require words, one can ‘bootleg’ (in the most positive sense) a melody, springing out from nowhere in a way that almost forms the words automatically in your mind as in Julius Eastman’s Femenine No.8 Be Thou My Vision (Mao Melodies) where all of a sudden appears a single verse of the famous hymn ‘Lord of All Hopefulness’ – a tune which (as far as I know) was originally bootlegged from the Irish ballad The Lovely Bann Water. Bootlegging is constant and infinite and will exist forever and therefore we must use it for our own means, a tool for the disintegration of the hegemonic systems that hold us.
*illegally make, copy, or sell something