Award for Robert Walser

Source: Popular Music, Vol. 14, No. 2 (May, 1995), p. 257

Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/853403
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Popular Music (1995) Volume 14/2. Copyright ? 1995 Cambridge University Press

Middle
Eight
Award for Robert Walser

Congratulations to Robert Walser, who has won the 1994 Irving Lowens
for Distinguished Scholarship in American Music, given by the Sonneck Soc
for his article 'Eruptions: heavy metal appropriations of classical virtuosity
lished in Popular Music, 11:3.

Debate

Quote Unquote

Simon Frith

In the humanities, at least, academic work is necessarily a matter of quotation. In

literature departments, for example, students don't just learn to describe how texts
work, they have to demonstrate them working this way. Literature degrees are
organised around the art of quotation: how to choose the right extracts, how to
footnote, how to avoid the charge of plagiarism.
Published literary criticism is equally quote-dependent, but now a legal ques-
tion is posed: what rights do scholars have in other people's words? The usual
answer these days (though it varies in detail from country to country) combines a
formal legal concept of 'fair use' (for the purpose of 'review') and an informal
agreement among publishers to allow 'reasonable' quotation for academic pur-
poses. Problems still arise with poetry (what is a 'reasonable' quotation from a
few lines?) but the biggest literary legal disputes usually concern unpublished
work, executors, dead writers' letters and drafts. Certainly in my twenty plus
years as an academic I have never had to worry about my (extensive) use of
quotations from academic or literary texts.
I also assume (from the lack of any evidence to the contrary) that quotation
hasn't been a problem for academic musicologists either. The old music they cite is
mostly out of copyright, while the tie between the academy and the contemporary
composer is so close that music publishers are presumably reluctant to bite one of
the few hands that feeds them.
Popular music studies are quite another story. Here too serious scholars nee
to quote - printed lyrics, transcribed music, recorded sounds' - but in this situati
we are constantly frustrated: either we can't get permission at all or else the fe
requested is exorbitant. The problem is that whatever the legal concept of fair us
there are no informal agreements between book and popular music publishe
257

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