Draw a straight line and follow it.
Apparently I’ve just broken copyright law. I can’t believe what’s holding up my Cage book: you are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young’s “This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,” and Yoko Ono’s “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn’t responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text.Â
This seems not to have been the case 13 years ago. When I wrote American Music in the 20th Century, I quoted La Monte’s piece about feeding hay to the piano, and several others, without even footnoting them because they were so famous, and no one at Schirmer batted an eyelash. But now, if something’s changed and I can no longer quote Fluxus texts without getting permission, then I just have to write Fluxus off the list of things I write about. Some of these pieces are too brief to refer to without quoting them in their entirety. How do you use Nam June Paik’s “Creep into the vagina of a living female whale” as an example without giving the whole piece away? How am I supposed to refer to it: “Creep into the vagina, etc”? Call it Danger Music No. 5 and tell you to look it up? Paraphrase it: “crawl into the birth canal of a matronly member of the order Cetacea”? And if the copyrights are held by unreasonable people who can hold your book hostage to their detailed demands, then it’s just time to find a different research area. The situation is absurd, somebody under whatever questionable chemical influences scrawls seven words on a piece of paper and 50 years later I can’t refer to that piece of paper without paying someone some money and following their prescriptions. A couple of years ago my Music Downtown book was held up because the designer had used the Village Voice font on the cover. The creeping tentacles of copyright law are paralyzing the arts and making intelligent scholarship and even creativity impossible.Â