de=da=duh=D'OH/ bloooooze and thievery

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

At 21.23 +0100 99-10-07, Dave Berry wrote:
>You're arguing from a folklorist p-o-v, but what about classical music --
>say one of Beethoven's string quartets?  His authorship has stood the test
>of time.  And similar examples persist from the 15th Century.

Sure--there's no fast and hard rule about where and when people started
caring more about these issues. Even within a given society, authorship
might be commonly attriubuted in one genre of entertainment while not
another. Yet by modern lights, there can be no "traditional"
compositions--everything *must* have had an author even if we don't know
who it is. The issue is how much people care about knowing who the author
is and crediting them.

An early blues recording artist might have known he learned such and such a
song from such and such a person. Did that teacher compose the song
entirely or in part, or did they learn it from someone else? Did the
recording artist know? Who wrote it first? Of course, these issues were
largely brushed by at the time and generally the composition was
copyrighted to the performer whether or not they and actually composed it
(entirely or in part).

As for classical composers--well, everytime one did a little minuet based
on some "folk melody" they heard, did he attempt to attribute it? ;)

I emphasize that I'm not discussing whether Zeppelin did with the blues
songs they ripped off was legally or morally correct, I'm simply suggesting
that it was probably pretty similar to the sorts of things pre-recording
blues performers did all the time. I think it's an interesting example of
how our society's views have changed.

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/