BY JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff

When it comes to using music of native peoples from around the world for commercial purposes, normal ethical values — not to mention current copyright laws — don’t always seem to apply.

Most people wouldn’t think of lifting a song by the Beatles without crediting and paying for the usage. Yet they might easily make off with a melody, for instance, by the indigenous Suya Indians of the Brazilian Amazon, offering no reference to its origin.

Who owns the music? It is a significant question, and a serious problem, for ethnomusicologists. Devoted to understanding the meaning of music as cultural phenomena, these scholars often find themselves in the role of guardian of that musical heritage.

“We are in the midst of an intellectual-property gold rush,” said Anthony Seeger, professor of ethnomusicology. “Thousands of fortune seekers are trying to stake their claims to promising territory, existing claims-holders are seeking increasingly aggressive means of defending their claims and the original owners are often being ignored.”

The issue looms large in this era of the Internet, when file-exchange technologies like iMesh and Morpheus have made it possible to pull music — copyrighted or not — straight off a computer.

But such problems predate the global reach of the Internet. Seeger cites Paul Simon’s phenomenally successful “Graceland” album, which came out in 1986 with an infectious mix of rhythms and melodies from South Africa’s townships combined with traditional pop. While “Graceland” didn’t make use of actual traditional music recordings, it inspired imitators who, in some cases, have expropriated the real thing, earning vast sums of money for themselves from music that’s not their own while putting nothing into the pockets of the actual creators.

“When I started out making field recordings 30 years ago, there wasn’t a world-music industry,” said Professor Timothy Rice, chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology. “But now, a recording can be unscrupulously ‘sampled’ by commercial artists and mixed in with their synthesizers and their drum beats and all of a sudden there’s a product worth millions of dollars.”

The problem is of particular concern to Louise Spear, archivist of UCLA’s Ethnomusicology Archive, an extensive collection of field recordings by hundreds of researchers and collectors. The archive’s recordings don’t leave the building; they may only be listened to in the facility and may not be duplicated without the explicit permission of the musician or collector.

“One of the questions I hear all the time,” said Spear, “is, ‘What good is it if I can’t copy it?’ There is an assumption that if the music exists, anyone and everyone has a right to have it.”
Dealing with representatives of Hollywood television or movie productions can often prove particularly challenging.

“They come in with requests like, ‘We’re doing a movie that takes place in Africa, and we want authentic Pygmy music. Give me something that’s not copyrighted so that I can use it quickly and easily and cheaply for my movie.’ ”

But, Spear asserted, it simply doesn’t work that way. Rather, “they need to contact the collector, ask for permission and work out an agreement.”

And in many cases such requests are impossible to fill under any circumstance. Some pieces of music in the collection, for example, are of a religious nature and are meant to only be listened to in an appropriate context. Others are pieces that are intended to be heard only by women.

The popular notion that anything “ethnic” is up for grabs — anything that might fall within the categories of so-called world music or roots music — also is proving to be a problem for scholars as they go about conducting research of music around the world.

“I’m concerned by the growing perception among indigenous people that ‘someone is getting rich on our music,’ ” Seeger said. “It is becoming harder to be an ethnomusicologist with a tape recorder today than it used to be. People are always suspicious, even when we have no commercial intentions.”

UCLA is in the forefront of addressing the complex issues with which all archives are now grappling. Last winter, the ethnomusicology department’s conference on “The Role of the University Sound Archive in the Twenty-First Century” drew scholars from around the world. Seeger has written extensively about these issues, and he serves as a member of the International Council for Traditional Music’s Committee on Musical Copyright.

Yet copyright law alone, Seeger said, won’t solve the problem. In some respects, in fact, new laws could make things more difficult for musicians and researchers alike.

Because “most musicians take musical ideas and transform them,” Seeger said, “there is a distinct possibility that more laws will further inhibit live, creative performances and restrict the exchange of musical ideas.”

The African-American tradition, for example, places great emphasis on improvisation, notes Professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, director of the Ethnomusicology Archive. She has extensively studied the gospel and spiritual music she grew up with in her hometown of Jesup, Georgia.

In that culture, she explained, performers start with a basic body of material — “music that was created, say, during the slave era, spirituals like ‘Go Down Moses.’ From there, each performer goes on to tell his own version of ‘Go Down Moses.’ It becomes a new song each time someone creates it.”

What’s more, concepts of ownership vary from culture to culture. Among the Suya, for example, a song belongs not to its composer but to the person who sings it aloud for the first time. Among Native Americans, said Rice, “there are issues of ownership based on notions of the power inherent in the songs.”

If there is to be greater copyright protection for indigenous music, Seeger said, the law must truly protect musicians, not just music companies. Current U.S. copyright law protects only recent music compositions, and then only for the life of the composer plus 70 years; traditional music, including American folk and roots music, is unprotected and considered to be in the public domain.

“The real issue is not the music industry but the economic and cultural exploitation of one group by another group or individual,” said Seeger. “When music is owned by indigenous people, it is seen as public domain. If it becomes popular in its mainstream form, though, it suddenly becomes individual property. The song brings a steady income to the person who individualized it, not to the people from whose culture it derived.”

Times are changing. Seeger noted that on the international level, the 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services requires individual countries to establish their own copyright laws. Some countries that previously had few laws in this area are now striving to protect their traditions.

The issues won’t be resolved quickly or easily, however. “The legal issues will have to be solved by lawyers,” said Seeger. “The ethical issues [raised by researchers and scholars] will have to be dealt with by changing attitudes and behaviors.”

At the very least, some combination of obtaining a musician’s permission and making attribution may constitute a respectable solution.

Ethnomusicologists going into the field today routinely seek written or taped verbal permission before recording music.

“While we’re waiting to change the laws, which may take a lifetime,” Seeger said, “it’s equally important to change the sensibilities of people using this music so that they recognize the rights of the original performers.”

He envisions a “new awareness” of the issues of musical ownership.

“People need to realize that you don’t just take music off of an old recording without finding out who owned it,” Seeger said.

“To do so, you are making off with a product of their creative spirit. By law and by moral right they should have a say in what is being done with it.”