Laws, Patents, and Musical Notation

Abstract

For over a millennium, Muslim theologians, music theorists and philosophers have debated the religious permissibility of musical activity and listening. Sometimes called “the samā‘ polemic,” this debate has explored the meanings of a wide range of sonic practices, from the rhythmic poetry recited while driving camels to Beethoven, with the Qur’an serving as the ultimate standard for divinely-inspired sonic arts. In the new millennium and the expanded possibilities of digital music, a new set of practices and debates are emerging, particularly focused on the performance of nasheed, devotional poetry that is traditionally sung unaccompanied or with a daf frame drum. Such poetry can address a range of themes lyrically, from encouraging those going to war to more contemplative themes (in YouTube parlance, sometimes called “sad nasheed”), but increasingly makes use of a cappella-styled beatboxing or other vocal samples to create a rhythmic track that avoids the use of drums. In turn, Muslim clerics, especially those who actively use YouTube and other social media as platforms for broadcasting, have weighed in on the permissibility of such actions, resulting in serious theological explorations of what beatboxing is and how to understand artists like Maher Zain or the London-based Halal Beats collective. In this paper, I examine this interface of different forms of utterance: of mouths, of beats (originally with drums, and now with mouths augmented by the affordances of microphones, samplers and digital audio workstations), and of acts of legal pronouncement such as the fatwa. Quite often, the medium of interface for these utterances is YouTube or Facebook, creating a kind of meta-mediation that is both interactive (allowing likes, comments, and video responses) and also often siloed by online content algorithms. Drawing on the work of Eliot Bates on actor-network analyses of recording studios and Banu Şenay’s work on body/instrument interfaces in Muslim sacred music, I suggest that the beatboxing debates not only add a new set of examples to the long history of samā‘ polemic, they reformat the entire debate for the digital age.

Biography

Peter McMurray is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Cambridge. His work focuses on intersections of sound and Islam in contemporary and historical contexts, with particular emphasis on Turkey and its diasporas. His forthcoming book and media project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin, draws on ethnography and audiovisual documentary to explore the sacred sonic practices of Muslim migrants from Turkey who have moved to Berlin since the Cold War era. He has also published extensively on oral poetry and the history of audio technologies. 

Abstract

The USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) is home to over 200 unique systems of music notation spanning more than two centuries. From notation inventions for the blind to those for specific religious practices, from systems designed to address racial difference to inscription systems for new technologies such as the player piano, the typewriter, and computers, these inventions document an ongoing, dynamic history of vernacular musicians grappling with the restrictions of standard forms of music notation.

In 2019, Floris Schuiling proposed a model for music notation that applied Actor-Network Theory (ANT) methods to understand music notation systems as “interfaces for imagining virtual music relations.” Schuiling and Emily Payne (2022) elaborate on this approach by positioning music notation as a cultural phenomenon both influenced by, and influencing, the physical and social contexts of music-making. The music notation patents of the USPTO constitute a unique archive of musical experience. From the point of view of a professional musician or music pedagogue, these inventions may not seem particularly useful or even novel in comparison to standard practice. However, as a data trace of musical innovation outside the purview of formalized music education and practice, each invention reveals a unique understanding of music writing, as well as whom and what notation should serve and represent.

In this paper, I will leverage the concept of music notation as an interface to position these patents as time-specific documents tethered to organological developments, historical events, and social contexts. Using Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs as a framework, I will explore how differences in these symbol systems manifest particular concepts about the purposes and uses of music writing. Each symbol system embodies a distinct mode of knowledge, an interface that negotiates between institutionally established standards and extra-institutional factors, revealing a diverse, as yet unaddressed, history of music making and innovation in the United States.

Biography

Ginger Dellenbaughis a music historian who has taught and written about music and politics, cultural techniques of the human voice, and vernacular notation systems. She holds a B.Mus. in Vocal Performance from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from The New School for Social Research. For over a decade, Ginger performed classical and contemporary repertoire in Europe and the United States. Her recent book, Maria Callas’s Lyric and Coloratura Arias (Bloomsbury, 2021), uses this 1954 album as a lens to examine various aspects of cultural commodification of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture. Her writing has appeared in, among others, Oxford American and Public Seminar. In 2022, Ginger co-founded an AMS Study Group dedicated to the study of music notation, inscription and visualization. She is currently a doctoral candidate in music history at Yale University completing a dissertation on music notation patents of the USPTO.

Abstract

Recent years have seen a turn to the study of bureaucracy, markets, and organizations in German-speaking media scholarship (e.g., Beyes and Pias 2019; Schröter 2018; Vogl 2010). One of the distinctive features of this literature is its dissatisfaction with the perceived overemphasis on materiality in previous iterations of media study. While remaining committed to the thesis that techniques are generative of epistemic distinctions (Siegert 2015), these authors revisit some of the classic problems of qualitative sociology, such as institutional maintenance and disrepair, and the collective production of credit, belief, and solidarity.

This talk brings some of these perspectives to bear on music studies, aiming to complement the discipline’s recent emphasis on instruments and organologies with consideration of the logistical-organizational form that so often grounds the very practices associated with those organologies—namely, the “legal instruments” that are “contractual media.” Although performance and recording contracts have been the objects of scrutiny in industry-oriented popular music studies (e.g., Stahl 2013), they have received less attention from musicologists, who have tended to treat them as historiographic sources, rather than objects of methodological interest as such. But what kinds of materialities of communication are contracts (Suchman 2003)? What sorts of infrastructures for communication do contracts afford?

Examining early phonograph contracts and advertisements in which recording artists were said to have “entrusted” their auditory reputations to their record companies, this talk suggests one possible answer to those questions—that attention to contractual instruments necessitates a reconsideration of “sound fidelity,” the bad object par excellence for sound media scholarship for decades (e.g., Sterne 2003). Approaching “fidelity” as underwritten by contractual media instead attunes us to the term’s etymological roots in the ancient Latin fides, a word whose semantic resonances encompass “good faith,” “credit,” and, indeed, “belief.” To what extent might sound reproduction then be understood as a fiduciary medium, one that implicates relationships of trust and confidence, of loyalty and a quasi-juridical “duty of care”? Insofar as musical performance and the circulation of sonic commodities are underwritten by “contractual solidarity” (Durkheim 1893), that has largely been a function of notarized documents and (today) blockchain smart contracts.

Biography

Matt Mendez is a PhD candidate in music history at Yale University, where he is also a Graduate Certificate student in the Film and Media Studies Program. He is currently completing a sound studies dissertation on the juridical idea that we each have “a right to the sound of our own voice,” and of the corollary legal claim that the distinctive sonorities of each of our voices are a kind of “property,” the use of which by others, it is said, ought to be subject to our partial, or even exclusive, consent and control. Matt was the winner of the Society for American Music’s 2023 Mark Tucker Award for his paper “Haunted House Blues: Bessie Smith, Vocal Possessions, and the Time of Redress.” His article, “History Beyond Recovery: Julius Eastman and the Challenge of the Heterological,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 2024.