Musical Appropriation In Music

In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument, or a sound recording in a different song or piece. This process, while relatively new in terms of technology, stems from the long practice of musical appropriation. First, this paper will look at musical appropriation and then explore sampling specifically.

Musical Appropriation The act of creating art is rarely, if ever, a truly original action. The literary scholar Harold Bloom coined the phrase anxiety of influence, which describes the belief that there is no such thing as an original poem: “new poems originate mainly from old poems; that the primary struggle of the young poet is against the old masters.” The same is true

No where is this clearer than in the British Invasion, pioneered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, and the Animals. These bands co-opted African-American rock and blues heavily. Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were all obvious influences to bands in and around the British Invasion. The Second Wave of the British Invasion, which included the bands Led Zeppelin and Cream, is heavily beholden to American bluesmen, as exemplified by Led Zeppelin’s cover of Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” While this is a cover and not a sample, it supports the notion that music is a creative medium that has always and will always rely on appropriation. In light of this, copyright law misrepresents the creation of music—considering it a purely original act rather than a progression in a cultural

The Futurists sought to regulate the noises of everyday life: “the rumble of thunder, the roar of a waterfall, the...white breathing of a nocturnal city, the coming and going of pistons,” into an “Art of Noise.” The Futurists’ goal was furthered by the French movement musique concrete, which was fathered by composer Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer would create “abstract sound mosaics divorced from conventional musical theory,” using “found fragments of sound -- both musical and environmental in origin -- he assembled his first tape-machine pieces, collages of noise manipulated through changes in pitch, duration, and amplitude . . .