The Classical Music Industry

1 Classical Music, Copyright, and Collecting Societies

Brian Inglis

Introduction: Copyright and the (Classical Music) Work-Concept¹

Copyright and classical music have a symbiotic relationship.² Although copyright once simply denoted the legal right to copy specific documents, it achieves its fullest potential when it defines fixed, bounded, and original abstract entities manifested in one or more physical modalities. The description readily applies to (implicitly classical) musical works, which Lydia Goehr calls ‘ontological mutants’: a piece’s identity lies neither in its score, for music is an aural medium, nor in any single performance or recording, for the same score gives rise to different interpretations; it is instead abstracted from the ...