NMEvolution

Music has been called by some the greatest thing the human race has ever done, and at its best it is undoubtedly a profound expression of emotion more poetic than anything Shakespeare ever wrote. True, done badly it can sound like a trapped cat in a box of staplers falling down a staircase, but let’s not get hung up on details here- music is awesome.

However, music as we know it has only really existed for around a century or so, and many of the developments in music’s  history that have shaped it into the tour de force that it is in modern culture are in direct parallel to human history. As such, the history of our development as a race and the development of music run closely alongside one another, so I thought I might attempt a set of edited highlights of the former (well, western history at least) by way of an exploration of the latter.

Exactly how and when the various instruments as we know them were invented and developed into what they currently are is largely irrelevant (mostly since I don’t actually know and don’t have the time to research all of them), but historically they fell into one of two classes. The first could be loosely dubbed ‘noble’ instruments- stuff like the piano, clarinet or cello, which were (and are) hugely expensive to make, required a significant level of skill to do so, and were generally played for and by the rich upper classes in vast orchestras, playing centuries-old music written by the very few men with the both the riches, social status and talent to compose them. On the other hand, we have the less historically significant, but just as important, ‘common’ instruments, such as the recorder and the ancestors of the acoustic guitar. These were a lot cheaper to make and thus more available to (although certainly far from widespread among) the poorer echelons of society, and it was on these instruments that tunes were passed down from generation to generation, accompanying traditional folk dances and the like; the kind of people who played such instruments very rarely had the time to spare to really write anything new for them, and certainly stood no chance of making a living out of them. And, for many centuries, that was it- what you played and what you listened to, if you did so at all, depended on who you were born as.

However, during the great socioeconomic upheaval and levelling that accompanied the 19th century industrial revolution, music began to penetrate society in new ways. The growing middle and upper-middle classes quickly adopted the piano as a respectable ‘front room’ instrument for their daughters to learn, and sheet music was rapidly becoming both available and cheap for the masses. As such, music began to become an accessible activity for far larger swathes of the population and concert attendances swelled. This was the Romantic era of music composition, with the likes of Chopin, Mendelssohn and Brahms rising to prominence, and the size of an orchestra grew considerably to its modern size of four thousand violinists, two oboes and a bored drummer (I may be a little out in my numbers here) as they sought to add some new experimentation to their music. This experimentation with classical orchestral forms was continued through the turn of the century by a succession of orchestral composers, but this period also saw music head in a new and violently different direction; jazz.

Jazz was the quintessential product of the United States’ famous motto ‘E Pluribus Unum’ (From Many, One), being as it was the result of a mixing of immigrant US cultures. Jazz originated amongst America’s black community, many of whom were descendants of imported slaves or even former slaves themselves, and was the result of traditional African music blending with that of their forcibly-adopted land. Whilst many black people were heavily discriminated against when it came to finding work, they found they could forge a living in the entertainment industry, in seedier venues like bars and brothels. First finding its feet in the irregular, flowing rhythms of ragtime music, the music of the deep south moved onto the more discordant patterns of blues in the early 20th century before finally incorporating a swinging, syncopated rhythm and an innovative sentiment of improvisation to invent jazz proper.

Jazz quickly spread like wildfire across the underground performing circuit, but it wouldn’t force its way into popular culture until the introduction of prohibition in the USA. From 1920 all the way up until the Presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt (whose dropping of the bill is a story in and of itself) the US government banned the consumption of alcohol, which (as was to be expected, in all honesty) simply forced the practice underground. Dozens of illegal speakeasies (venues of drinking, entertainment and prostitution usually run by the mob) sprung up in every district of every major American city, and they were frequented by everyone from the poorest street sweeper to the police officers who were supposed to be closing them down. And in these venues, jazz flourished. Suddenly, everyone knew about jazz- it was a fresh, new sound to everyone’s ears, something that stuck in the head and, because of its ‘common’, underground connotations, quickly became the music of the people. Jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong (a true pioneer of the genre) became the first celebrity musicians, and the way the music’s feel resonated with the happy, prosperous feeling surrounding the economic good times of the 1920s lead that decade to be dubbed ‘the Jazz Age’.

Countless things allowed jazz and other, successive generations to spread around the world- the invention of the gramophone further enhanced the public access to music, as did the new cultural phenomenon of the cinema and even the Second World War, which allowed for truly international spread. By the end of the war, jazz, soul, blues, R&B and all other derivatives had spread from their mainly deep south origins across the globe, blazing a trail for all other forms of popular music to follow in its wake. And, come the 50s, they did so in truly spectacular style… but I think that’ll have to wait until next time.

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A Brief History of Copyright

Yeah, sorry to be returning to this topic yet again, I am perfectly aware that I am probably going to be repeating an awful lot of stuff that either a) I’ve said already or b) you already know. Nonetheless, having spent a frustrating amount of time in recent weeks getting very annoyed at clever people saying stupid things, I feel the need to inform the world if only to satisfy my own simmering anger at something really not worth getting angry about. So:

Over the past year or so, the rise of a whole host of FLLAs (Four Letter Legal Acronyms) from SOPA to ACTA has, as I have previously documented, sent the internet and the world at large in to paroxysms of mayhem at the very idea that Google might break and/or they would have to pay to watch the latest Marvel film. Naturally, they also provoked a lot of debate, ranging in intelligence from intellectual to average denizen of the web, on the subject of copyright and copyright law. I personally think that the best way to understand anything is to try and understand exactly why and how stuff came to exist in the first place, so today I present a historical analysis of copyright law and how it came into being.

Let us travel back in time, back to our stereotypical club-wielding tribe of stone age human. Back then, the leader not only controlled and lead the tribe, but ensured that every facet of it worked to increase his and everyone else’s chance of survival, and chance of ensuring that the next meal would be coming along. In short, what was good for the tribe was good for the people in it. If anyone came up with a new idea or technological innovation, such as a shield for example, this design would also be appropriated and used for the good of the tribe. You worked for the tribe, and in return the tribe gave you protection, help gathering food and such and, through your collective efforts, you stayed alive. Everybody wins.

However, over time the tribes began to get bigger. One tribe would conquer their neighbours, gaining more power and thus enabling them to take on bigger, larger, more powerful tribes and absorb them too. Gradually, territories, nations and empires form, and what was once a small group in which everyone knew everyone else became a far larger organisation. The problem as things get bigger is that what’s good for a country starts to not necessarily become as good for the individual. As a tribe gets larger, the individual becomes more independent of the motions of his leader, to the point at which the knowledge that you have helped the security of your tribe does not bear a direct connection to the availability of your next meal- especially if the tribe adopts a capitalist model of ‘get yer own food’ (as opposed to a more communist one of ‘hunters pool your resources and share between everyone’ as is common in a very small-scale situation when it is easy to organise). In this scenario, sharing an innovation for ‘the good of the tribe’ has far less of a tangible benefit for the individual.

Historically, this rarely proved to be much of a problem- the only people with the time and resources to invest in discovering or producing something new were the church, who generally shared between themselves knowledge that would have been useless to the illiterate majority anyway, and those working for the monarchy or nobility, who were the bosses anyway. However, with the invention of the printing press around the start of the 16th century, this all changed. Public literacy was on the up and the press now meant that anyone (well, anyone rich enough to afford the printers’ fees)  could publish books and information on a grand scale. Whilst previously the copying of a book required many man-hours of labour from a skilled scribe, who were rare, expensive and carefully controlled, now the process was quick, easy and available. The impact of the printing press was made all the greater by the social change of the few hundred years between the Renaissance and today, as the establishment of a less feudal and more merit-based social system, with proper professions springing up as opposed to general peasantry, meaning that more people had the money to afford such publishing, preventing the use of the press being restricted solely to the nobility.

What all this meant was that more and more normal (at least, relatively normal) people could begin contributing ideas to society- but they weren’t about to give them up to their ruler ‘for the good of the tribe’. They wanted payment, compensation for their work, a financial acknowledgement of the hours they’d put in to try and make the world a better place and an encouragement for others to follow in their footsteps. So they sold their work, as was their due. However, selling a book, which basically only contains information, is not like selling something physical, like food. All the value is contained in the words, not the paper, meaning that somebody else with access to a printing press could also make money from the work you put in by running of copies of your book on their machine, meaning they were profiting from your work. This can significantly cut or even (if the other salesman is rich and can afford to undercut your prices) nullify any profits you stand to make from the publication of your work, discouraging you from putting the work in in the first place.

Now, even the most draconian of governments can recognise that your citizens producing material that could not only benefit your nation’s happiness but also potentially have great material use is a valuable potential resource, and that they should be doing what they can to promote the production of that material, if only to save having to put in the large investment of time and resources themselves. So, it makes sense to encourage the production of this material, by ensuring that people have a financial incentive to do it. This must involve protecting them from touts attempting to copy their work, and hence we arrive at the principle of copyright: that a person responsible for the creation of a work of art, literature, film or music, or who is responsible for some form of technological innovation, should have legal control over the release & sale of that work for at least a set period of time. And here, as I will explain next time, things start to get complicated…