Music

Who “owns” traditional music?

More and more musicians are registering traditional music from their community of origin with copyright agencies under their own names. This phenomenon of appropriation, which has accelerated over the years, raises many questions, especially when it comes to the right to use traditional music that may be centuries old. 

Ethnomusicologist Brigitte Des Rosiers, a researcher at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’UdeM (centre for research on ethics, known as the CREUM), is studying the ethical and legal aspects of protecting traditional music as part of her postdoctoral work. The copyright system as applied in most countries gives individuals ownership of their original compositions. That right is limited to 50 years after the composer’s death in Canada and 70 years in the United States, after which the works pass into the public domain. However, heritage and traditional music, with no known authors, are also in the public domain. “Therefore, it is possible to use this music and exploit it financially without having to pay fees to the communities from which it came,” Des Rosiers points out.

A case in point is the first recording by Deep Forest (a French group consisting of musicians Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet), which came out in 1992. The musicians’ compositions included excerpts of songs from recordings originally produced by ethnomusicologists who have been recording traditional music for more than a century in order to analyze the musical material  (transcriptions are archived). “Ethnomusicologists work on what the music may mean to the societies that use it, and they’re interested in both the features of the music and the sociological aspects,” she says. However, the concept of conservation and preservation is now coming in conflict with certain economic interests.

Some groups, notably the native and aboriginal communities, have taken issue with what they believe to be forms of appropriation of their traditional knowledge. They are exercising their right to legal control over access to and distribution of their cultural and artistic productions. In response to these claims, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has developed a set of proposals to counter the unauthorized use of traditional music, encouraging the communities, groups or states to take ownership of their musical heritage. As part of her postdoctoral work, Des Rosiers is attempting to pin down the ethical bases of these proposals while reflecting on how ethnomusicology can contribute to this debate, which is essentially legal and political. For her, the new WIPO provisions are open to criticism from many standpoints, raising major ethnomusicological questions as they involve the identification and redefinition of the relationships between individuals, music and community.

To ensure protection, WIPO is recommending that each community take an inventory of its heritage. Des Rosiers believes that this exercise is hard to imagine for mixed societies. It can be extremely difficult to determine the “paternity” of a particular rhythm or melody, she says, pointing to the example of Creole music from the Île Rodrigues (part of the Republic of Mauritius), which she analyzed for her Ph.D. “How can this community claim to be the exclusive owner of a musical repertoire that was mainly constructed of borrowings from other music, notably European, some of which are certainly registered with copyright agencies?” she asks.