An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 22 | CLOSING THE GAP: CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 549

halt distribution of The Grey Album, though no listener would consider

it a commercial replacement for the Beatles songs, the unfair use that

the DMCA was designed to prevent. In response, a number of websites

coordinated an offer of free downloads of The Grey Album on Febru-

ary 24, 2004, a date they called “Grey Tuesday,” one of the fi rst acts of

electronic civil disobedience to protest stringent copyright protection

laws. The album, EMI’s reaction, and the Grey Tuesday protest brought

Danger Mouse notoriety and sparked interest in his next venture, the

alternative hip-hop duo Gnarls Barkley, whose other half is singer and

rapper Cee Lo Green.

The most prominent mash-up artist in the second decade of the

century is Girl Talk. He began releasing mash-ups in 2002 while still a

college student and continued while working as a biomedical techni-

cian, not becoming a full-time professional musician until 2007. As a

live DJ and as a recording artist, Girl Talk creates complex collages of

a dozen or more songs, highly danceable and depending for their full

effect on the listener’s recognition of the sources. Instead of copyright-

ing his works, he licenses them through Creative Commons, an organi-

zation that promotes alternatives to traditional copyrights; the licenses

allow users to make their own derivative works based on Girl Talk’s,

such as the music videos that proliferate on YouTube and other Inter-

net video sites. His albums are available only as downloads, and rather

than set a fi xed price he asks users to pay what they choose.

If Girl Talk confi ned his mash-ups to live performance, he could

probably fl y under the radar of the record companies whose recordings he sam-

ples. His albums, in contrast, seem deliberately to invite litigation. Yet as of this

writing, no lawsuit has been brought against him. Some commentators believe

that his opponents hesitate to do so for fear that he might win in court, establish-

ing a precedent that construes the artistic reuse of prerecorded music as fair use.

Many of his fans see him as a copyright-law provocateur, a folk hero for remix

culture.

Paradoxically, in one sense remixes and mash-ups are a reversion to the earli-

est phase of the popular music industry: the sheet music era. Sheet music invites

users to take liberties with the music, altering it to conform to their own tastes

and abilities. The technological breakthroughs at the turn of the present century

have allowed users to treat sound recordings in the same way. Although it has

happened in a way that John Philip Sousa might never have imagined, remix cul-

ture has ended the passivity that the March King feared the phonograph would

induce. Amateur music making, though far removed from the community cho-

ruses and town bands of Sousa’s day, is alive and well.

CLOSING THE GAP: CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Perhaps no twentieth-century condition did more to fragment the world of clas-

sical music than the gap between composer and audience. Beginning with the

rise of modernism in the 1910s, exploring new musical territory was often con-

sidered a higher artistic goal for a composer than communicating with general

K Mash-up artist Girl Talk

in performance, 2008.

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