͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
|
Theft you can hear Hi, This is the second letter from node.music. The first one asked who the author is when the composer never touches the tape and the machine composes on its own. This time the same question gets sharper: what if the author took someone else's music and didn't even try to hide it? |
|
1989 // Canada John Oswald built an album out of other people's records: twenty-five tracks, each one made from a single artist. Michael Jackson's "Bad" is shredded into fragments and put back together, Dolly Parton is slowed down until she sings in a man's voice. He never hid the sources. His method had one rule: the theft must be audible. Oswald mailed a thousand CDs stamped "not for sale" to radio stations, libraries and the artists themselves, free of charge. On Christmas Eve 1989 the lawyers arrived, and by February the remaining discs and the master tapes were physically destroyed. Seven hundred copies were already out. Why the evidence was never the free giveaway but the method itself - and what Milton has to do with it - The other two September nodes - Polish Radio's Warsaw studio and Raymond Scott's Electronium - were in the first letter. It's in the archive. |
| |
Four things from the research that did not fit on the site. | ■Trust me, I'm a Beatle | | In November 1968 Bernie Krause demonstrated the new Moog synthesizer to George Harrison. In May 1969 Harrison released an LP called Electronic Sound, and Krause heard his own demonstration on it. About the money, Harrison said that if the record made any, he'd send a couple of quid: "Trust me, I'm a Beatle." Krause didn't sue a Beatle; he only asked for his name to come off the sleeve. Nobody reprinted the sleeve. They covered his name with silver ink. |
| ■Music has no quotation marks | | In his 1985 talk Oswald points out that music has plenty of punctuation but no quotation marks. A lecturer draws them in the air with two fingers. A jazz player can't do that mid-solo without dropping the trumpet. And without quotation marks an honest quote can't be told from plagiarism. |
| ■The gentle borrower | | Charles Ives published his own music and gave it away. In the postscript to 114 Songs he calls the owner of the book "the gentle borrower." When he later allowed commercial editions, he signed the royalties over to other composers. |
| ■A film without pictures | | On 13 June 1930 Berlin radio broadcast Walter Ruttmann's "Weekend": eleven minutes of sound collage, edited on the optical soundtrack of film stock - with no image at all. For decades it was thought lost, until it turned up in New York in 1978. Today "Weekend" is out on CD with a set of remixes, and one of them is by Oswald. |
|
| // New in the bibliography |
|
Three things to read after this letter: | > | John Oswald, Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative - the 1985 talk itself. Instruments produce sound, tape machines reproduce it, and a sampler does both at once - erasing the very distinction copyright rests on. Harrison and the quotation marks come from here too. | | > | Chris Cutler, The Road to Plunderphonia - recording as music's third memory after the human one and notation, and the first that keeps not the structure but every audible detail. Plunderphonics follows from there. | | > | Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History - the chapter "Cut" reads Oswald as a composer rather than a defendant: what separates plunderphonics from the mash-up is not the source but the way you cut. |
The full list is at nodemusic.cc/sources. Over September it grew from 96 to 123 sources. |
Sorry, everyone - I'm a little late with Letter 002, so you'll get three letters in October instead of two. After that, we'll be back on schedule. Katerina |