Music Copyright and Cultural Hierarchy

This book explores how copyright law influences the cultural status of music. It analyses how UK copyright law has shaped a ‘cultural hierarchy’, ascribing (Western) classical music to ‘high culture’ and (Scottish) traditional music to ‘low culture’. Taking a socio-legal, critical, and interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses this central question through three sub-questions. (1) It reveals the different extents of protection that UK copyright law has accorded to different music manifestations and uncovers how this disparity is embedded in the notions of originality, authorship, and fixation. (2) It investigates how these notions changed the respective production paradigms of the two music genres during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in relation to their creation process, creatorship, and creation form. (3) It analyses how these changes endowed each genre with new aesthetic characteristics and contributed to its ascription as either ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture. Bringing these three strands together, the book develops a model of how copyright law shapes the cultural hierarchy of music. As the first book to debunk the cultural hierarchy of music through a copyright lens, Music Copyright and Cultural Hierarchy challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between law and culture and proposes a new model for examining how law reshapes the production and perception of music. It will spark interest among intellectual property scholars, legal historians, (ethno)musicologists, and anyone interested in the intersection between law and music.