Early Musical Borrowing

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This ground-breaking book examines the multifaceted dynamics between copyright law and music borrowing within a rich diversity of music genres from across the world. It evaluates how copyright laws under different generic conventions may influence, or are influenced by, time-honoured creative borrowing practices. Leading experts from around the world scrutinise a carefully selected range of musical genres, including pop, hip-hop, jazz, blues, electronic and dance music, as well as a diversity of region-specific genres, such as Jamaican music, River Plate Tango, Irish folk music, Hungarian folk music, Flamenco, Indian traditional music, Australian indigenous music, Maori music and many others. This genre-conscious analysis builds on a theoretical section in which musicologists and lawyers offer their insights into fundamental issues concerning music genre categorisation, the typology of music borrowing and copyright law's ontological struggle with musical borrowing in theory and practice. The chapters are threaded together by a central theme, ie, that the cumulative nature of music creativity is the result of collective bargaining processes among many 'musicking' parties that have socially constructed creative music authorship under a rich mix of generic conventions.

For twenty-four or more years composer Pierre de la Rue (d. 1518) provided music for one of the leading musical institutions of his day, the grande chapelle of the Habsburg-Burgundian court. Serving successive rulers Maximilian I, Philip the Fair, Juana of Castile, Marguerite of Austria, and the future Charles V, La Rue surpassed a dozen composer colleagues in his creation of polyphony to meet the needs of the court and its extravagant liturgy. This study, the first ever in English, traces La Rue's life and career, explores aspects of his compositional output, and recounts the reawakening of modern scholarship to his unique contributions.

This selection of classic essays on music performance practice of the Middle Ages addresses the most crucial of performers' decisions: pitch, rhythm and performing forces, as well as related matters such as proportions, tunings and the need for ornamentation. The volume includes essays on all types of music - monophony and polyphony, sacred and secular - and the introduction provides an overview of the major issues plus an extended bibliography of relevant scholarship.

Michael Alan Anderson explores the political implications of music devoted to St Anne in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.