City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research John Jay College of Criminal Justice 2010 Composition, Authorship, and Ownership in Flamenco, Past and Present Peter L. Manuel CUNY Graduate Center How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/jj_pubs/21 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] VOL . 54, NO. 1 ETH N OMUSICOLOGY WI N T E R 2010 1 2 3 4 5 6 Composition, Authorship, and 7 8 Ownership in Flamenco, Past and Present 9 10 PE T E R MA N U E L / John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center 11 12 13 mong the most fundamental musical developments accompanying 14 A the advent of modernity has been the emergence of new conceptions 15 of authorship, ownership, and the roles of composition. A growing body of 16 literature has emerged which addresses various aspects of these processes 17 in relation to diverse music cultures (e.g., Talbot 2000, Vaidhyanathan 2001, 18 Frith 1993). In the realm of Western art music, scholarly attention has fo- 19 cused in particular on the celebration, especially from the Romantic period 20 on, of the composer as an individual genius, and on the special importance 21 of “the work,” as an original, reproducible, structurally unified, aesthetically 22 unique, and privately owned entity (Goehr 1992). Concepts of authorship 23 can be particularly problematic in the case of oral traditions that evolve into 24 or become absorbed into commercial popular musics, entailing new concep- 25 tions of and a new prominence of the “song” and its individual composers, 26 and new notions of ownership as embodied in copyright.