Magazine / Culture / Sing! / Commentary | 21/05/2008

Music pirates

Only those who listen actively and perhaps even steal music - like today's DJs - are true listeners, writes French music philosopher Peter Szendy.

We know them all too well, the listeners who exchange music over the Internet, whose commentaries appear here and there, the snatches of music they send – and steal from – each other, this structure which forms the basis of listeners' activities on the web, this "peer to peer" practise which probably began with Napster.

Photo: kamirika (Photocase)

Other illegal sites have appeared since then, until they are censored or resurface into legality and demand user fees. But what one easily forgets with all the media hype is that these structures have precursors in the history of listening.

Permissible theft

In 1757, a certain Friedrich Wilhelm Zacharias declared outright that he wanted to be recognised as the "first German, the first human even, to have made musical piracy respectable". Four years earlier, in 1753, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach had also confirmed in his "Essay on the true way of playing the piano" that listening is "a permissible form of theft".
In their day these statements were dignified and venerable. Why do we find them so provocative today? Undoubtedly because Romanticism, and after it Modernism, have made us forget that listening means doing. Today the listener is considered happy to sit back and passively receive audible input.
Yet if listening, by contrast, is understood as an activity, it necessarily harkens back to more obscure – and more passionate – zones in the legal history of music, to the shady realm of plagiarism, citations and misappropriation… If listening is performative, then with it something has to happen to the original work of art. This is why any listening worth the name must touch the artwork in one way or another. And consequently it must also touch the legal system which is there to preserve the artwork's integrity.

The listeners are listened to

But contemporary listening technology also allows the listening traces of others, the active listeners – like so many DJs who plunder others' works for their own remixes – to be followed in turn. In this way, the very gesture which characterises their listening and makes it active leaves them open to be listened in on and monitored.
Listening today seems to be wrestling with the paradox I have tried to describe: the listener worthy of the name, who listens in the strong and active sense of the word, is the very one who risks finding himself – for better or for worse – being listened to, and listened in on.

Peter Szendy

Peter Szendy was born in Paris in 1966. He teaches aesthetics and philosophy at the University Paris X (Nanterre) and is musical advisor for programmes ...
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