When the alphabet was invented, spoken epics could be converted into an abstract representation - writing. The experience of the spoken epic poem could be transformed into written format. Although books can be read aloud and therefore retain some similarity to the communal nature of the oral tradition, books can also be read silently in solitude, emphasizing the individual reader. Among the many functions that Roger Chartier has attributed to the figure of the author is not only the role of creator to the content, but also to appropriate ownership of that creation to whomever owns the property rights to that content (36). Copyright law protects the specific manifestations of ideas and facts, but not those ideas and facts themselves. When commemoration was no longer used to experience memory, individual authors came to be recognized as readers became less participatory in the process of getting meaning from the work. The author as creator became an individual who gave meaning to an audience fragmented by the ability of the written word to separate its readers from one another. The author serves as a meeting point for individual readers to receive meaning, whereas in pre-literate times, this meaning would have been constructed by a the entire group in the immediacy of the performance.
In terms of property ownership, one parallel in music was the development of an agreed upon system of notes, scales, and representations of musical sounds and timings. This musical alphabet was necessary to write down scores of music, whether the ancient Egyptian's "music of the spheres" or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It serves to organize noise into a format that is accepted as the creation of a musician. As Albert Borgmann writes, "The identity and integrity of a piece of music can be underwritten by a score only if there is a complete and authoritative score" (94). This means that a written account of a performed piece is only equal in validity to the performed piece if some amount of authority is granted the former. The composer/author of the piece serves as the source of this authority. However, if there is no score, the identity and integrity of the piece must lie in its performance. In this case, it is the performers of the actual song that constitute it's integrity, and this has implications that undermine the functions of the author. Borgmann notes this chicken and egg situation:
But whether it
(music) is essentially signified structure (a score) or realized
(a performance) is very much disputed. The
dispute is fueled
by the need ever and again to go back and forth between the abstraction
and the realization of musical
structure, to
realize a score in a performance and to recognize a performance as being
of a score. (93)
If I were to perform a stunning rendition of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated," but my audience had no knowledge of the song's origin, than the identity and integrity of the song would be ascribed to me. If there was no way to record my version, or any other version for that matter, then my Ramones song would become part of the cultural memory; I would die, people would still play the song, but I would be forgotten and eventually the song would be attributed as "traditional" a term used today to qualify songs of unknown origin but wide cultural presence. We could probably also assume that the words and music to my Ramones song would change from performance to performance until a method for abstracting my performance into either a recording or score was possible. Bouncing back to the oral culture, this is essentially a representation of the Homeric Question: Did Homer really write The Iliad and The Odyssey? In parallel to Borgmann's response concerning score versus performance, Homeric scholar Robert Fitzgerald writes,
To sum up, The
Odyssey could well have been composed by one singer, working with themes
he had heard from others,
in a medium
developed by others; if single in one sense, the authorship was certainly
multiple in another. There is no way
proving it single
in any sense. (487).
In a print culture sense, Homer is the author because he confers the
authority, identity, and integrity of score to the poems. Under copyright
law, scores and recordings are protected as expression of a composer/author/creator/owner,
and those expressions are paralyzed into the medium. Problems don't occur
when older media make use of the expression as I am free to play any song
I want in live concert. Yet when newer media, using the same content,
extend the reach of older media, problems do occur. The interconnectivity
of the Internet undermines the individuality that both receiver and creator
previously had, and in turn undermines ideas such as copyright, which have
basis in individuality.