As part of the book I’m writing at the moment I’ve been reading and thinking quite a lot about the idea of what ‘property’ is, and how this relates to the arts – and music in particular.

Just the other day a new legal ruling was passed that ensured that ageing crooners like Sir Cliff Richard can still claim royalties for songs they recorded (not actually wrote) for 70 years. Cliff and others have been campaigning for this for some time, though some of their responses ring a little hollow for those of us who’ve done a little more work than Mick Jagger:

“Obviously the record business is not what it was, so people don’t earn as much as they used to. [The royalties] can extend their lives and the lives of their families who inherit their songs.”

Others have been far more skeptical, arguing that the ruling will only benefit the very few – like Jagger and Richards – and could serve to stifle freedom of expression, with older works remaining in copyright for so much longer.

Here’s my question – which I mean very genuinely, and would love to hear opinions from people who know better than I: to what extent should musicians get paid?

The historical stuff I’m reading paints perhaps very different picture of musicianship from that we see in Jagger and Richards. In the pre-recording era, it was impossible to ‘own’ a song in the way it is now. A song was not your property. Indeed, most musicians, from what I can gather, played variations on standards that they had inherited from other musicians – and thus existed by very much drawing on the open pool of song knowledge that existed in communities.

That pool has been enclosed and privatised, and musicians – from what Jagger is saying – should now expect to have their careers in music pay well into old age. Clearly, without investment so much musical innovation would not have been possible. But is it really right for songs to remain ‘owned’ by song-writers in perpetuity?

My hunch is that what the digital music revolution may have precipitated is a partial return towards the historic pattern: musicians making money through performance. I personally think they – and other artists – should have a right to be paid for their work, but that very long copyrights are, in the end, unhelpful. But I’d be really interested to know what others who may be in the business think about it, because I’m really not sure I’m right.

(PS – congrats to Iain Archer for having one of his songs as the opening track on the current UK number 1 album! He should be paid. Forever )

Interesting piece in The Independent yesterday, asking why people bother going to festivals when the sound quality is crap, there’s mud everywhere, you can’t sleep, and people push and spill beer all over you.

I visited Glastonbury once, many years ago now, and left utterly mystified. Why, I wondered at the time, did so many people feel, and with such obvious sincerity, that the music they loved would be enhanced by a pervasive smell of excrement and kebabs? Why was it thought to be an advantage to sit on a carpet of compressed garbage and observe one’s heroes from a distance at which they were virtually invisible?

This is a good question. Despite the great TV coverage, there is a part of me that still feels jealous of those who are actually there. And that’s, I think why, despite slightly depressed numbers this year, people will continue to go to festivals, especially in a digital age.

Why? Well, I’ve written more fully about the importance of festive, carnival spaces in Other. Glastonbury is (or can be – outside of the uber-commercial aspects) a TAZ. It is a place ‘penetrated by the marvellous’ – and exists for a short time only, but in that short time it re-frames us. Festivals are also dirty spaces. The fact that you don’t wash much and change your hygiene and sleep boundaries again force us to engage with otherness, and feel restored because of it.

But there’s also the indescribable sense of presence at festivals. You are THERE. And you are there together. And no matter how good your 3D TV and surround sound system, you won’t feel that unless you really are prepared to get down and dirty and be in the crowd. And that’s the sad thing about so much technology – it wants to replicate this sense of ‘togetherness’ but without the dirt. It wants us to be ‘in the action’ – at a football match or festival – but in a sterilised, mediated environment. And that’s just never going to cut it.

Which is why, after much thought, I had to be at Wild Goose. Where I won’t be blogging or tweeting much, just getting filthy and being with people, even if the sound quality is crap.

Interesting piece yesterday looking at why kids might play their crappy, tinny music through their stupid phones when on buses on trains. And why good, responsible adults might find their blood boiling when it happens.

With mobile phones in many a teenager’s pocket, the rise of sodcasting – best described as playing music through a phone in public – has created a noisy problem for a lot of commuters.

“All you can hear is ‘dush, dush, dush, dush’. It’s irritating. So many times I end up with a headache,” says Tracey King, who has signed up to the Shhh! Scheme set up by bus company Arriva Yorkshire to stop the noise on their services.

While I sympathise with Tracey, I would think it highly unlikely that the noise is actually going to give her a headache. Irritating it might be, but the volume that phones pump out is hardly going to damage eardrums.

“As teenagers, they don’t seem to have the capability to think about others. I have heard older women turning round and saying ‘will you turn that down?’ and sometimes they will… and other times I’ve heard them with abuse and swearing at other people.”

This is a classic case of having to deal with ‘the other’ – and is therefore something that my thoughts in the book should be applicable to. So what’s going on here? Why do people play music like this, and why do other people find it so irritating?

Firstly, the music. Some students who were interviewed for the piece didn’t think that playing music was antisocial, just that the bus was too quiet and they wanted something to listen to. However, a sociologist sees it being more about marking out ownership of space. This can be done physically – by lolling out and taking up a number of seats. It could also be done graphically by ‘tagging’ around various places. But the most immediate and obvious way of stating that you have control over a space is aurally because it flows so widely.

Clearly this is not about a need to hear music. The sound quality on a phone is terrible (though improving, and, horribly, music companies are now mixing music to sound better on these devices by boosting the treble) and wearing headphones would clearly lead to better sound for them and silence for everyone else. But it’s not about the music – it’s about trying to own a space.

Why then does this lead to such intense irritation? Again, it is not really about the sort of music being played. Would people complain less if someone boarded a bus and was playing Beethoven? I think that would depend on the person who was doing it. Because this is the thing: it’s not the music that is threatening, it’s the people playing it.

The anxiety and irritation that comes from music played like this is about the sort of people who are challenging to take control of a space. People find it irritating because they see it as a threat.

The music is an aural declaration of ownership of a space, and the anxiety is about not wanting those people to have that ownership. Why? Partly because we find it annoying that what is meant to be a democratically shared space – a bus – has been turned into a dictatorship. But partly because we find teenagers threatening per se – especially noisy ones, especially noisy ones from another culture.

This is what I look at in the book, drawing on Levinas and Zizek. Levinas is more of an optimist. ‘Look into the eyes of the other,’ he says, ‘and you’ll find goodness there.’ His challenge is to get to know these people, to overcome our fears about them. In other words, these teenagers are good people really, it’s just that we don’t know them yet, and so are afraid.

Zizek is critical of this. He sees that our anxiety comes not from our own unresolved feelings about the other, but from our concern that they have not resolved their own feelings within themselves.

In other words, the fear that we have of teenagers is that they are fearful and insecure themselves. This, I think is far more insightful. People play music on buses because they want to mark out space. But why do they feel the need to mark out space? Because they feel insecure, feel the need to proactively grab space and make it theirs.

What then would this suggest about how best to deal with the problem? Firstly, I’d say that we need to look into ourselves first and think carefully about where our irritation is seated. Perhaps we have an insecure sense of self too? Perhaps we are worried about being attacked? Or perhaps, as older people have always done, we feel threatened by the young.

Secondly, I think addressing the root of the problem will be about helping young people to feel secure in themselves. It is tough being a young person in a big city, and the need for safe spaces is huge. Playing your music on a bus is one way of creating some control over a space, and making it feel like home.

Teenagers are treated pretty badly by society in many ways. Not allowed into shops more than 2 at a time. Moved on by the police. Given tougher and tougher educational targets to meet – and then told that the exams were just easier when they meet them. So this problem needs to be faced by schools, and by parents and local councils and authorities too, who need to make young people feel welcomed and involved.

But more immediately, a smile can help. I regularly ask people to turn their music down, or off, when on a bus. And I’ve very rarely been refused. Why? Because I’ve tended to do so by trying to be polite and positive about it, rather than snapping and grimacing. Young people are not bad or totally lacking empathy. They just need to work out what their place is in the world. And it’s our job to make room for them and help them find that, not immediately snipe when they threaten our peace and quiet.

You can buy ‘Other’ here.

Now I’m off to Ypres and The Somme today on a school trip.

Funny old thing, life.

This video has been released documenting the recording of the piece – with the usual gaggle of pop-star celebs gathering to don their headphones and do their bit:

What is fascinating about this is how unbearable silence has become. I don’t want to read too much into it, because I think it’s brilliant and a bit of fun, but it’s clear that a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the lack of noise. And the dancing, gestures, coughs and shuffles are small outbreaks of resistance – small ruptures where the ego just has to break through.

In my very limited experience of trying to attain silence, these are the things I’ve battled with too. The absence begs to be filled, and we find it almost impossible not to do so. The same happens in classes: silence falls, and the first response is the giggle, the cough. ‘I’m still here’ the … silent … message of all of these small noises.

We should do more silence. It is good for us because it challenges the ego, and challenges us to think about where our identities lie. The reactions of these pop supremos having cameras on them but not being able to speak, or sing, or play shines a light onto all of our insecurities, and tells us something important about ourselves. And if that’s the message we get from this charity single, then I’m all for it. So go buy it!

Another example of how piracy has actually energised bands and the music industry to innovate.

“Closeness to God has always been connected with writing music. At the moment there’s no music.”

Pray for him.

Etiquette has it that one doesn’t at the end of movements, only at the end of whole pieces. When asked what the history of this convention was, one composer noted that it ‘had arisen during the 1920s, when music began to move from the church to the concert hall, and the piety of the church came with it.’ When to stand, when to sit, where the hell we are in the prayer book – church-going does nothing if not refine your sense of when the right time to do something is.’

What’s lovely about this is that we’re seeing a reversal: the concert hall has become the church: 30 or 40 years after churches became worried about trendy new people coming in and spoiling the altar cloth, it’s the grand classical halls that are now worried about ruffians ignorant of convention. What’s been their response? To offer an ‘alternative service’ – check out the ‘Night Shift’ concerts given by The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Whatever our position, this asks the question of all of us: what is our reaction to those who receive in a different way to us? Music, worship, art and gifts. Is our mode of reception preventing others from sharing?

_______

See also from the archives: ‘On Music‘

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe

To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,

Two clocks moving apart

At light speed never separate

And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,

As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,

You locked us in:

No information shall travel faster than light,

Yes, our infinity, given a limit:

46.5 billion light years

To the edge

Of us.

But you are there, and I here,

And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,

A new spacetime arcs out,

Socking the eye with an infinite number of

Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now

A father’s physics wants me to believe in

Another me,

Beginning 10 to the 10

to the 29 metres far away.

Too far, and yet too close,

For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,

Hugh Everett III, what have you done?

“The existence of other universes

is inevitable”

Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,

Which denied too the objective reality

Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:

“Between 0 and 1:

A single random number

With all its infinite decimals,

Is expressed, computationally,

Longer

Than

The computational expression

Of the whole set of numbers

That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:

A universe of infinite parallels

May be more economic

Than a straight, linear,

Singular

One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,

Though, in this universe, we are apart,

And somewhere else there are more in betweens

Than we could ever fathom.

And that may be more efficient

Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,

Thinking,

What is love, and life and us,

Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,

And chose to forego

In the infinite possibility

Of the efficient multiverse,

And dig long

And deep

For life,

And love,

In this

One?

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