To start off our theme this week of appropriation and ownership issues in the arts, today's music post will discuss these problems.

Understanding the value of the arts and having a respectful attitude toward others' works are valuable lessons for all students. However, first we must understand to what extent a person can "own" music and how this affects how we learn about it.

Until the twentieth century, composers had a different attitude about ownership. Several composers published their music under another composer's name in order to gain from a more famous composer's prestige. Historians' mistakes also affect false attribution. For example, this wiki discusses the long list of symphonies that may be falsely attributed to Mozart.

In 1958, Remo Giazotto seems to have written an original Baroque-style piece for organ and strings, claiming that he reconstructed the piece from fragments of the music of Tomaso Albinoni, an early 18th century Italian Baroque composer. This wiki has information about the debacle. We still don't know who to attribute the piece to, although Giazotto is a very likely candidate for writing a vast majority of the work, but its value as a musical composition is undeniable. Here's a Youtube "video" (it's only audio) of an excellent performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan.



This brings me to my second point. The modern music industry has been forced to adapt in the face of file sharing services like Napster, and although musicians (like Lars Ulrich of Metallica, who sued Napster) can try to fight the free sharing of what people see as files for popular consumption, this is a moot point. As technologies like MP3 encoding and faster internet connections ensure the distribution of copyrighted music across the globe, the music industry must adapt and realize the value of what can't be shared between computers in Indonesia and California: live, human performance. Music is really an art of arranging sound in time, and although all sorts of activities are involved in producing music and making recordings, these recordings are only a representation of a live performance.

Appreciating a live musical performance is purely individual, and this experience cannot be shared with another person. Of course, discussion about music helps us understand it better, but the real appeal is performance.

Teaching students to understand and appreciate a live musical performance helps create the next generation of people who listen responsibly and treat the arts with respect.