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Music,Software,and Sustainable Culture
“A Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt A letter sent to Governors on February 26,1937
If we are to discuss the limits of intellectual property in the age of a new cultural economy (orvice versa, the question of what new cultural economy can exist within the limits of modern-dayintellectual property), we must first define the nature of these two subjects before we candescribe and then reason about their relationships and interactions with one another.The definition of culture given by Wikipedia provides an excellent starting point:
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate,”) generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give suchactivities significance and importance. Cultures can be “understood as systems ofsymbols and meanings that even their creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries,that are constantly in flux, and that interact and compete with one another.” Different definitions of “culture” reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, orcriteria for evaluating, human activity.Culture is manifested in music, literature, lifestyle, food, painting and sculpture, theater and film and similar things. Although some people identify culture in terms ofconsumption and consumer goods (as in high culture, low culture, folk culture, orpopular culture), anthropologists understand “culture” to refer not only to consumption goods, but to the general processes which produce such goods and give themmeaning, and to the social relationships and practices in which such objects andprocesses become embedded. For them, culture thus includes art, science, as well asmoral systems.(1)
We can see that by its very etymology, the concept culture is rooted in a concept of land. Land,in turn, is governed by laws of real property, which is a subclass of property. It remains a subject of great debate whether intellectual property is a proper term or one designed to promote confusion(2), but it certainly becomes obvious that at an etymological level the concepts of culturaleconomy and any theory of property (intellectual or otherwise) are incestuously related by thousands of years of symbolic and legal history. Nevertheless, as farmers adapt to global climatechange in their cultivation of agricultural land, we who farm ideas must also be sensitive to theeffects of legal climate change and how we might adapt our methods of creative cultivation inorder to survive. The most important aspect of understanding culture, and thus a cultural economy, is to understand “the general processes which produce such goods and give them meaning, and the socialrelationships and practices in which such objects and processes become embedded.” This suggeststhat a cultural economy should be understood not in terms of maximizing consumption or profits, but in terms of sustainability, for without sustainability the long-term prospects of cultural achievement is ruin.
Let us now consider the question of sustainability more concretely by focusing on two culturalsub-domains, music and software, and we will quickly see the challenges and complexities ofboth the context and the subjects we have chosen.Any attempt to define what music is necessarily attempts to define also what music is not. Herbie Hancock deftly escapes this paradox by explaining that to him, music represents possibilities(3). This same idea was expressed by Wagner to Liszt in 1850 (as reported by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise(4)):
I have felt the pulse of modern art and know that it will die! This knowledge, however, fills me not with despondency but with joy … The monumental character of ourart will disappear, we shall abandon our habit of clinging firmly to the past, our egotistical concern for permanence and immortality at any price: we shall let the pastremain the past, the future—the future, and we shall live only in the present, in thehere and now and create works for the present age alone.
In the context of sustainability it is understood that death is merely the end of life (dust to dust),whereas extinction is the end of birth. In Wagner’s message to Liszt, Wagner makes clear thatdeath is not to be feared as long as there is birth. Conversely, any system that trades the possibility of birth for the prolongation of life is making a serious error, for it is irreversible.Indeed, one of the major themes of Ross’s book is the extent to which artists of the 20th century would defy convention, even the limits of aesthetic appreciation, in order to declare the possibility of birth. This journey led to entirely unpredictable offspring: from the harmonic andmelodic roots of traditional classical music emerged the chromatic of syntax of Liszt, Wagner,Mahler, and Strauss. Chromatic extremes led to compositions of extreme dissonance. (Mahlerconsidered Salome “one of the greatest masterworks of our time” and could not understand whythe public took an immediate liking to it(5).) Beyond dissonance, the atonal works of Schönberggave birth to a whole new school where musical mathematics and the 12-tone row replaced melody (6). Béla Bartók moved classical music beyond the confines of the 12-tone system by incorporating folk music devices, such as bent notes, to the repertoire(7). Jazz was another new invention of the 20th century—a collaborative form in which the music was never fixed until themoment it was played(8). New technologies, new instruments, new genres tested the very limitsof what could be considered music. “Beauty of sound is beside the point” Paul Hindemith instructed the player in his Second Sonata for Solo Viola (9). John Cage’s 4'33' is a work of pure silence in three movements(10). And so ranged the birth-possibilities of music, unfettered.But there was much more to the evolution of music than merely schools and theories of composition or performance. Consider this excerpt from an essay written by Greg Sandow(11):
Slowly, though, the genres [of popular music and classical music] started to blend.Each side found something to envy in the other. People who loved classical music(I'm using this term, of course, with its early 19th century meaning) envied the farmore accomplished performances in popular music concerts. And as the prestige ofclassical music spread, popular musicians, like Liszt, began to be rebuked becausethey didn’t play enough Beethoven. As the 19th century progressed, concerts concentrated more and more on the music of the past. Between 1815 and 1825, at concerts by one of Vienna’s leading musical organizations, 77 percent of the music was by living composers and only 18 percent by dead ones (nobody knows the death dates ofthe composers who wrote the remaining five percent of the music). By 1849, the percentages had almost exactly reversed.
Far be it from me to advocate what sort of music people should listen to—whether by composers now dead or living—but one cannot deny the enormous effect on culture and the composer when the cultural economic cycle exceeds the composer's lifetime. One of the first responses to this desperate state of affairs was to look at these percentages asnegative correlates of quality. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, the devil informs Leverkühn that he will never be popular in his lifetime but that his time will come(12):“You will lead, you will strike up the march of thefuture, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need tobe mad.” Ross puts this Faustian bargain into a larger context as he explains:
Yet Mann knew what he was doing when he put his composer in league with thedevil. Faust’s pact is a lurid version of the kinds of stories that artists tell themselvesin order to justify their solitude. Eisler, when he read Mann’s novel, connected it totheperceivedcrisisofclassicalmusic inmodernsociety.“Great art,as theDevilmaintains, can now only be produced, in this declining society, through complete isolation, loneliness, through complete heartlessness . . . [Yet Mann] allows Leverkühn todream of a new time, when music will again to a certain extent be on first-nameterms with the people.” Other composers of the fin de siècle similarly conceived theirsituation as a one-man fight against a crude and stupid world.
Schönberg took this a step further when he declared “[i]f it is art, it is not for all, and if it is forall, it is not art”(13). In this context, any discussion of the fairness of a copyright bargain seemsutterly absurd, like trying to establish the market value of one's offspring.Meanwhile, new theories of the nature of art and music took root. Schönberg wrote to Kandinsky “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” To the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni he wrote: “I strive for: complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and logic.”(14) Gustav Mahler is credited with saying “If a composer could saywhat he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music,”(15) which tells us that these composers were thinking culturally, not economically.It might be convenient to blame the decline of the livelihood of living composers on some newfangled technology the way that mp3 files and p2p filesharing networks have been blamed forthe decline of commercially recorded music, but the timeline doesn't support that. The shift in musical taste documented in 1849 predates the invention of the recording cylinder by 28 years(16), and predates John Phillip Sousa’s famous testimony before the US Congress that “talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development in this country”(17) by nearly 60 years.Instead this decline was a function of cultural change, as when a forest matures from fast-growing soft woods to slow-growing hardwoods.
In fact, while Sousa saw recorded music as competition for his own big-band productions, hecompletely missed the many ways that technology was giving birth to new musical forms. BélaBartók used recording cylinders and hours of painstaking analysis to decode the DNA of Magyarfolk music, opening new pathways in both classical and jazz music(18). Amplification (before it became completely over-used(19)) made possible new configurations of musical performance.Broadcast made possible entirely new venues, such as a kitchen table, for experiencing musicalperformance, greatly democratizing what had been the exclusive domain of the elite. High-fidelity, long-playing records (and later CDs) further democratized the opportunity to experiencemusic, transcending both space and time. This explosion of creativity and technology led to acorresponding increase in the diversity of our cultural stores, a new range of economic opportunity, and an inevitable upset to the status quo.The question of sustainability therefore turns on the question of what is to be sustained. Rosswrites about Boston’s Symphony Hall, where the name BEETHOVEN is carved in stone where acrucifix might be if the hall were a church, and he describes the common practice of carving thenames of other European masters all around the circumference of auditoria, signifying unambiguously that the buildings are a cathedral for the worship of imported musical icons. Rossasks, “How could your name ever be carved alongside Beethoven’s or Grieg’s when all availablespaces were filled?”(20) What sort of sustainability is that? Not one of a living culture, but of alimestone quarry. It is a cowardly museum that can only be sure of significance after its subjectsare long dead.In the world of agriculture, a remarkable discovery concerning sustainability is emerging: thequality of soil is more than the sum of its parts. Topsoil accrues in nature at the rate of 25mm per 500 years(21). Intensive farming practices deplete topsoil at 10x to 50x times that rate(22). We now know (scientifically at least) that the chemical replacement of nutrients stripped by rowcrops like corn and soybeans does not reconstitute the full nature of the soil. The question of soilsustainability is thus not an exercise of chemical stoichiometry but an ongoing organic processthat must remain in fair balance. So, too, the question of cultural sustainability is not limited totaxing one population for the remuneration of another, nor of declaring one class of people tobe in service of another (whether for just compensation, national interests, or both), but of permitting the unfettered processes of creativity and discovery to give birth and evolve as natureherself would allow. Historically there was seldom any comfort for those who most dependedupon the processes of cultural development, but the whole of culture was sustained by theirefforts, rather than depleted for their convenience. This is the balance now in flux.Music and software are alike in that both can be represented by notations which, interpreted aspure data, result in a functional output. Indeed, player-piano rolls were as much a form of software as punch cards and paper-tape were for early computers. Moreover, the syntax of music, itsphrasing, and the formal structures of many classical styles that exhibit recursive (ABA, ABBA,ABA CDC ABA) or serial thematic patterns are highly reminiscent of recursive and sequentialsoftware algorithms. Musical quotations function like software subroutines—a shorthand reference that can recall, recontextualize, or transform the meanings and emotions of that whichwas referred. Jazz standards define a set of standard interfaces and conventions that permitwide ranges of possible interpretation, not unlike the mash-ups that can be achieved with interoperable software services.But software has overtaken music in one fundamental and culturally relevant way: software cul ture has moved beyond mere function (Gebrauchsmusik)(23), meaning(24), or object(25), and into the realm of self-sustaining governance,(26), (27) which is the subject of a new book by Christopher Kelty,Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Kelty argues, and I agree, that the majorbreakthrough of free software culture is the fundamental principle of the recursive public. As Kelty explains(28):
Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playingfield self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seekto level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government,corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply wantto level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity assuch. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind ofagency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by itstechnical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors)they can compete fairly.
By adopting a set of principles that allow arbitrary modification and amendment by any selfwithin the public—the agency of many different humans—the recursive public of free softwaregets around both the fixed conventions literally carved in stone (Beethoven, et al) and it avoids the morally questionable assertion by Stravinsky that “lesser artists borrow, but great artistssteal!” In the world of free software, there is no need to steal per se, but merely the right to cultivate as one sees fit. Richard Stallman knows well the loneliness that Mahler and Schönbergbemoaned, but he did not invent a recursive public to be popular. He did so to make his life possible. How might one apply the teachings of software to the community of music? It is simple, almost:adopt the principles necessary to support a recursive public. Musical conventions define tempo,key signature, tuning, etc., but the musical community defaults on questions of law and legaluse, and thus defaults its own destiny. As multinational constituencies of rights-holders seek tolevel the playing field to their advantage, they enlarge the scope and lengthen the duration oftheir powers as rights-holders. The evidence is overwhelming. Consider the evolution of USCopyright Law(29):
From 1790–1909, copyright was 14 years plus 14 year renewal From 1909–1976, copyright was 28 years plus 28 year renewal From 1976–1998, copyright was 75 years, or 50 years beyond the death of the author From 1998–present: copyright was 95/120 years, or 70 years beyond the death of author And starting in 1998, ever-increasing criminal penalties for what was “fair use.”
While composers and performers may have first believed that these additional restrictionsaccrued some benefits to themselves, there is increasing evidence that these legal changes arelargely tilting the field to postpone the end of life (of Mickey Mouse as a creative work protect ed by copyright) at the cost of preventing new birth, at the cost of allowing new names to becarved into new venues. How else can we explain the fact that in 2006, 44 years after formingtheir band, the Rolling Stones would be called to play a concert for which they themselves werejudged to be too old to attend?(30) The field of music has become like a farm whose topsoil hasbeen so completely abused with pesticides and fertilizer, an environment so hostile to cultureand so unsustainable that the only future options are government-sponsored GMOs or theplanting of a cemetery.I said that the teachings of software for music were simple, almost. The “almost” part is thatwhile the free software community has successful bent the notes of copyright to create infinitepossibilities of birth, the courts and the governments have “gifted” to us a new set of rights weare not permitted to refuse: software patents. Since at least the 1980s, software patents have been likened to legal landmines(31), and this analogy fits well the framework of culture and cultivation. Whereas the copyright expansions and extensions have overtaxed the soil, softwarepatents create fear and destruction among the cultivators by their random, invisible, and unpredictable behavior. It is a legal application that makes no sense, an accident that has become asinister agenda.I will close with this excerpt from Greg Sandow:
Here’s a striking vignette that shows popular music merging with classical music. Itcomes from the chapter on 19th century listening that opens Peter Gay’s book The Naked Heart: [Berlioz] recalled that he had once heard Liszt ruining Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonatawith extraneous trills, tremolos, and embellishments. But in a later recital, Liszt showed himself more pious as he performed the same piece for a small group offriends. It was late in the afternoon, and the lamp was going out. Berlioz welcomedthat; he thought the dim twilight would be right for the opening adagio movementof the C-sharp minor sonata. But Liszt went him one better: he asked that all thelights be extinguished and the fireplace covered. Then, in total darkness, Berliozremembered, after a moment’s pause, rose in sublime simplicity the noble elegy hehad once so strongly disfigured; not a note, not an accent was added to the notesand the accents of the author. When the last chord had sounded no one spoke—wewere in tears. So where did this lead? Directly to the classical music world we know today, in whichthe old-time classical music rules have completely taken over. We listen in silence;we worship the great composers; we think concert music ought to be complex andlofty. There’s just one thing, though. Somehow we’ve brought the popular music ofthe 19th century—insanely silly Rossini operas, flashy Paganini concertos—into theclassical pantheon, and this doesn’t make any sense. Our classical music world hasn’tjust lost touch with the culture around it; it’s forgotten its own past.
We should celebrate the taste, empathy, and artistry that Liszt demonstrated in his total performance, but we should recognize that it is up to us to make our own decisions, to performaccording to our own context, and we should be free to explore every aspect of creativity—from concept to performance, in any media, for any purpose, lest we become trapped in the absurdity of our own ignorance. The Free Software, Open Source and Creative Commons(32)show the way,but we must be bold enough to treat the recursive amendment of our artistic work as the mostimportant artistic and cultural statement we can make. It is how we will make music and ourculture sustainable. And we can only hope that as more people understand the nature of music,the nature of culture, and the nature of creativity, we will rewrite the laws to favor sustainability over statis.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture  zurück
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_intellectual_property zurück
(3) http://www.herbiehancock.com/music/discography/?aid=48 zurück
(4) Ibid, p. 9 zurück
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonality zurück
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bart%C3%B3kzurück
(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz zurück
(8) Ross, p. 182 zurück
(9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%2733%27%27 zurück
(10) http://www.artsjournal.com/greg/2006/10/_october_11_2006_greg.html zurück
(11) Ross, p. 34 zurück
(12) Ross, p. 39 zurück
(13) Ross, p. 57 zurück
(14) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler zurück
(15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder zurück
(16) Ibid zurück
(17) Vgl. eben da, S. 73zurück
(18) http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=32769 zurück
(19) http://blog.miraverse.com/?p=87 zurück
(20) Ross, p. 129 zurück
(21) United States Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, “Fact Sheet” (USDA, April 1993). zurück
(22) http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=1 zurück
(23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebrauchsmusik zurück
(24) http://www.people.carleton.edu/~jlondon/musical_expression_and_mus.html zurück
(25) Ross, p. 108 zurück
(26) http://opensource.org/definition.php zurück
(27) http://gnu.org/ zurück
(28) Kelty, Christopher, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke University Press,Durham 2008 p. zurück
(29) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law zurück
(30) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4584858.stm zurück
(31) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fighting-software-patents.html zurück
(32) http://creativecommons.org/ zurück
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