“The activity of making and listening to music involves in something that is never merely personal. In this sense, music is like a language; when we ‘speak’ or ‘listen’ in musical language, we participate in a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter whenever we involve ourselves with music.

The problem of making judgments about music is rooted here. Its collective, communal aspect suggests that its significance exceeds our purely individual responses, but at the same time we tend to experience music as significant in intensely personal and subjective ways. This seems to be an essential quality of music: it is collectively significant but speaks to the individual in a manner inaccessible to rational argument and dispute.”

– Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, 2002

“No culture so far discovered lacks music. Making music appears to be one of the fundamental activities of mankind; as characteristically human as drawing and painting. The survival of Paleolithic cave-paintings bears witness to the antiquity of this form of art; and some of these paintings depict people dancing. Flutes made of bone found in these caves suggest that they danced to some form of music. But, because music itself only survives when the invention of a system of notation has made a written record possible, or else when a living member of a culture recreates the sounds and rhythms which have been handed down to him by his forebears, we have no information about prehistoric music. We are therefore accustomed to regarding drawing and painting as integral parts of the life of early man, but less inclined to think of music in the same way. However, music, or musical sounds of some variety, are so interwoven with human life that they probably played a greater part in prehistory than can ever be determined.”

– Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind, 1992

Photo credit: thelunch_box.

“A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture–a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators of the past.

For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history–between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission–has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.”

– Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, 2004

“The fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make their work available for free. After all, they are still investing their time without being paid back. Why?

The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn’t make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities–even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.

This disrupts the old equation of ‘fame and fortune.’ For an author to be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people face a dilemma they’ve never had before: fame vs fortune.”

– Clay Shirky, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, 2003

“The question of tradition interests me because Goa has become the site, both mythical and historical, for a sort of tantric hand-off between an earlier generation of Western trance dancers and today’s psychedelic ravers. Whether or not Goa is the core source of rave spirituality, the freak colony has grown into a spiritual origin, a source. But this does not make it simply another myth. In a roundabout way, the narrative surrounding Goa in itself affirms the spiritual aspirations and gnostic power of today’s global psy-trance scene. Because for all its rhizomatic multiplicities and cyberdelic futurism, the scene demands a backstory for its embodied illuminations, a context-building tale about initiation and transmission. For it is in telling such a tale that tonight’s body-without-organs grows to encompass the eternal return of its progenitors, and that something rather ancient can find its dancing feet again.”

– Erik Davis, Hedonic Tantra, 2004