Musical Borrowing syllabus

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School for the first time. Here’s my syllabus. It will probably evolve as we go, but this is the initial plan.

This course on “non-original” music explores how frequently existing compositions have been appropriated and adapted into new works, and how these borrowings challenge conventional notions of originality and authenticity. The course provides historical perspectives on musical borrowing from the Renaissance through 19th-century paraphrases and 20th-century cover versions to debates about sampling and plagiarism cases today. It explores the evolving cultural, philosophical, legal, and economic considerations around the phenomenon of musical borrowing. Students engage with these topics through guided listenings, readings, response papers, quizzes, class presentations, and creative projects, with a final research/analysis paper on a recent/current case of musical borrowing. A basic knowledge of music theory and some ability to read music notation are helpful but not required for this course.

Continue reading

Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar!

The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.”

But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the ones in “Freedom ’90.”

Let’s unpack!

Continue reading

Is it okay to post tracks with unlicensed samples?

I am not a lawyer, just a guy who studies hip-hop academically. But I’m married to a lawyer, and have spoken to various music industry people and done a lot of reading on this. My advice is to go ahead and post tracks with uncleared samples, even though doing so is technically illegal.

Flute in Simpler

Understand that you are not allowed to use samples without permission, even if you are giving away the track for free, and even if you give credit and say you aren’t intending to infringe anyone’s copyrights. But posting tracks with uncleared samples is “illegal” the way jaywalking is illegal. It is very unlikely that doing it will get you into any trouble. Entertainment lawyers cost money, and the copyright holders have better things to do than go after indie artists who aren’t profiting off their samples. The chief copyright attorney for a major publisher told me that they don’t go after random people on the internet, because there’s no upside, and it attracts negative publicity.

If your track does blow up, and you want to release it on a major label, or license it for a TV show or movie, or otherwise make real money from it, then the situation changes. At that point, you will absolutely have to negotiate a sample clearance, both with the songwriter(s) and the owner(s) of the master recording (usually not the same people). You or your label can use a sample clearance service, or hire an entertainment lawyer. I do not recommend trying to do this on your own. The clearance might take the form of a one-time fee, a percentage of royalties/publishing, or both. Depending on who you sampled and how well-resourced they are, this might be a big up-front payment or a major percentage of your publishing. So you or your label might decide that it doesn’t make sense to go through with the clearance. At that point, you will have to replace the sample or withdraw the track from circulation.

Continue reading

Lil Nas X and the racial politics of country music

As of this writing, the biggest song in America is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. It might also be the most interesting pop song of the 21st century so far.

“Old Town Road” defies genre categorization. Like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” it sits entangled in a vast musical rhizome. Lil Nas X calls it country-trap. It’s definitely not a rap song–Lil Nas X sings throughout, with a clear country twang. The beat sounds like hip-hop, but then, the beat of almost every slow or medium-tempo pop song sounds like hip-hop right now. The banjo suggests country, but as we’ll discuss below, that suggestion was unintended by the track’s producer. There’s a lot going on here! Before we take a look at its broader cultural significance, then, let’s take a close look at the musical details of “Old Town Road.”

Continue reading

Big thoughts on music tech

A student interviewed me for a class project on “the impact of music technology on the music industry.” Her questions and my answers follow.

How did you get interested in music technology?

I got interested in music technology the first time I touched an instrument. So did you! I don’t think we should even have a subject called “music technology”, because it properly includes every aspect of music other than unaccompanied singing. Saxophones and pianos are no more “natural” or non-technological than computers. For that reason, I don’t do much teaching about technology in class; I teach the creative processes of music production, specifically, recorded music of the African diasporic vernacular tradition, what the music academy calls “popular.” I talk about that because other college courses don’t, and I think it’s important for music educators to know how to make the music that their students like. I have the freedom to do that because there is no standard way to teach music tech – when I was hired, I was told to pretty much do whatever I saw fit.

Bouncy Synth - Ableton Arrange View

I got interested in recording technology when I first tried recording myself with a tape recorder at age six. I got interested in learning how to do it well when I was in college, and my folk band went into a studio. We spent a bunch of money and got back a result that was so-so. It became clear that my money would be better spent on a computer, an interface, some software and a couple of microphones. This was in the late 90s, when the price of all of those things was falling dramatically, and it was becoming possible to get professional-sounding results in your apartment without spending tens of thousands of dollars. At first I was only interested in recording voices and live instruments. I started programming drums, samples, and synth parts as placeholders for “real” instruments. But then I got interested in making those sound better, because so much of the music I like uses synths and samples. The world helped push me in that direction, since there’s a lot more demand for producers than for guitarists. Continue reading

What should we call classical music?

Everyone can agree that the term “classical music” is silly, unless we’re specifically talking about European music of the Classical period.

The Mozart family played actual Classical music

It’s incorrect to call Baroque or Romantic or modernist music “classical,” even though we all colloquially do, to the annoyance of the classical tribe. It makes even less sense to call the music of Steve Reich or Julia Wolfe “classical.” So what should we call it?

Continue reading

Please stop saying “consuming music”

In the wake of David Bowie’s death, I went on iTunes and bought a couple of his tracks, including the majestic “Blackstar.” In economic terms, I “consumed” this song. I am a “music consumer.” I made an emotional connection to a dying man who has been a creative inspiration of mine for more than twenty years, via “consumption.” That does not feel like the right word, at all. When did we even start saying “music consumers”? Why did we start? It makes my skin crawl.

Barbara Kruger - Untitled

The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the verb “to consume” descends from Latin consumere, which means “to use up, eat, waste.” That last sense of the word speaks volumes about America, our values, and specifically, our pathological relationship with music.

Continue reading

Goodbye SoundCloud?

I love SoundCloud. I love it for being an exceptionally easy way to share my music with people all over the world. I love the community aspect, especially the Disquiet Junto. I have all of my students host their portfolios there. But like a lot of the electronic musicians who form the heart of the SoundCloud userbase, I’m running into some problems with copyright.

Recently, I needed to unwind from a stressful morning, so I fired up Ableton, put in some Super Mario Bros mp3s and James Brown breaks, and went to town. I uploaded the results to my SoundCloud page, as usual, but got one of their increasingly frequent copyright notices.

SoundCloud copyright notice

I’ve uploaded a lot of material to SoundCloud that violates copyright law in various ways, and for the most part, no one has made any objection. I’ve occasionally used some long intact samples that triggered takedown notices, but my remixes and mashups are usually transformative enough to slip through the filter. Lately, however, I’m finding that SoundCloud has dramatically stepped up its copyright enforcement. A few months ago, I could have posted my Super Mario Bros/James Brown mashup without any trouble. Not any more.

Continue reading

Why do people think music should be free?

The best way to get a professional recording artist angry is to say that everybody has a right to download their music for free. The outrage is well-motivated. Recording music at the pro level is expensive, in time as well as money. Just because it’s easy to pirate music, why have we as a society all of a sudden decided that it’s acceptable? Shoplifting is easy too, and we don’t condone that. My musician friends sometimes feel like the world has gone crazy, that in the blink of an eye their work went from being valuable to worthless. How could this change have happened so fast?

I have a theory, and if you’re a musician, or you aspire to be one, you won’t like it: people are right to expect music to be free.

Continue reading