Various features of American popular music have morphed and diversified since the Tin Pan Alley days of the late 1800s (Everett 2004, Brackett 2016, Peres 2016). By contrast, changes in form occur in abrupt punctuations followed by long periods of relative homogeneity. Several studies have offered bottom-up explanations for changes in formal paradigms from technological (Gronow 1983, Brackett 2016, Barnett 2020) and aesthetic perspectives (Summach 2011 and 2012, Nobile 2022), but their scope excludes the persistence and recession of formal types. I argue that the American music industry has undergone at least three “form regimes” during which one formal type was produced at higher volumes than all others, that each regime is delimited by the industry’s labor practices, and that abrupt changes in the division of labor account for abrupt changes in dominant formal types.

Georgina Born’s study on IRCAM’s internal politics foreshadowed many recent concerns regarding AI’s imposition on artistic creation. In explaining IRCAM’s development of AI programs that codify harmonic progressions, Born notes that “AI-influenced composition represents its ultimate rationalization, the scientific, high-cultural version of what Adorno accused the cultural industries of bringing about: the standardization of music.” (Born 1995, 319). This observation is now manifest in the popularization of creative AI technologies that generate new compositions with minimal user expertise. Ironically, AI restrains modernism from its attempted aesthetic rupture, as original artistic works have their music-structural data appropriated and then translated into music-theoretical procedures. Generated compositions then satiate consumer-capitalist demands for faux-modernist “universalizing” novelty without developing procedural novelty.

This paper hypothesizes future directions for musical modernism’s aesthetic mission, analyzing and critiquing the ontological assumptions within musical semiotics that are unsettled by AI. Current copyright laws vary worldwide regarding whether novice users or AI-service corporations are the legal authors and, by extension, owners of output compositions. Authorial questions are particularly unsettling when creative AI arrives at its logical endpoint whereby personal identities are emulated. Such legal tensions correlate with an irreconcilable structure inherent in modernist aesthetics: as Generative Adversarial Networks classify sonic data into procedural rules that may legally justify substantial similarity, so too does Barthes’ vocal “grain” become sublimated into the plane of processed signifier data, collapsing the ontological distinction between original author and artwork.

It is this now-broken semiotic framework that the modernist-capitalist model of authorial copyright law relies on and which it currently struggles to reconcile. Certain legal scholars recommend weighting creative protections to the “persons” responsible for AI without admitting that AI is administered by elite corporations, thus reifying the monopolization of symbolic goods theorized by Pierre Bourdieu. The paper concludes by hypothesizing two paths that may allow musical modernism to circumvent AI appropriation. The first involves a potential legal argument that neglects copyright for anyone engaging with creative AI outputs, and the second involves “experiential” compositional instructions that stray from authorial direction, whereby compositions are oriented towards performative interactions of musical material.

Recent decisions regarding copyright infringement in popular music have been strongly influenced by testimony from forensic musicologists due to the imbalance of musical understanding between the expert and the court. This paper focuses on the intersection between music copyright law and music theory. In particular, the role of musicologists and music theorists in copyright infringement cases and the influence they have on court decisions when acting as expert witnesses, or forensic musicologists. Forensic musicology is a form of “public music theory,” an approach used by academic music theorists when issues in society rely on the knowledge of professionals or experts. Typically, public music theory embraces public knowledge over analytical methods and focuses on improving the musical understanding of the public (Jenkins 2021). Unfortunately, this balance is not often prioritized in the testimony of forensic musicologists. Katherine Leo (2021) notes that the role of forensic musicologists is to act as translators to the court and identify protectable and non-protectable elements of musical compositions.

This paper offers a framework for analysis that aims to promote public music theory and clearer arguments from forensic musicologists. I take a Schenkerian approach to analyzing the alleged similarity between musical works discussed in court, due to the theory’s legal background and similarity to the legal understanding of “music.” Copyright infringement in the United States follows a standard two-step test, as set out in Arnstein v. Porter (1946) and Krofft v. McDonald’s (1977). The use of a forensic musicologist as an expert witness is only allowed during step one of two in order to determine whether copying has occurred, not whether the amount copied is unlawful. The answer to this question must be “yes” for the court to proceed to the second step of the test, which asks whether the amount copied is unlawful. As a result, forensic musicologists are given a considerable amount of power over the outcome of a court case, and having been hired to defend one side of an argument, they are rarely held accountable for their testimony.