Copyright itself is a product of Western printing and electronic inventions, combined with the Western individualistic ethos applied to the arts. Although the idea of individually owned artistic or intellectual property is fruitful in practical terms when applied to contemporary commercial Ghanaian music (i.e. it yields royalties for the author), problems arise when this European-derived notion is applied to the collectively-created and orally-transmitted folkloric music of Ghana. Unlike that of the West, folkloric music in Ghana is very much alive and evolving.

The dualistic schism between mind and matter of the 17th century French philosopher Descartes has been regarded analytically — since Ryle’s critique in the 1950s — as bearing the problem of ‘the ghost in the machine’. For the modern urbanized world this also describes the existential state of alienation and anomie often found among those living in a completely technological environment. This environment includes the contemporary soundscape and musical practices that have been transformed by modern recording and mass communication techniques.

I have been running a recording studio in Ghana since 1982 and have noticed a number of technical changes that have dramatically affected local popular music-making. These have resulted in many recording artists and performers becoming lost in the musical machine. The number of tracks in a recording studio has increased to the nearly infinite number available from digital computer systems. This makes overdubbing the order of the day, whereby a single musical technician can provide all of a song’s instrumentation. So musicians on stage interacting with a live audience have been superseded by electronic mediation, mobile discos (spinners), videos, television and lip-synching, i.e. television musicians miming to pre-recorded work. Another change that began in the late 1980s is the replacement of drummers by drum machines, horn sections by single keyboard players and guitars by synthesizers. In some cases the entire instrumentation of a band is provided by one electronic instrument, such as the Yamaha computerized keyboard.

The same need for ‘feel’ applies to symphonic orchestras where, despite written scores, the subtle interpretations of the composition are done on the spot by the conductor and virtuoso musicians. This is why Art Music recordings are always made by the whole orchestras in one take and not by a series of overdubs. Yet for today’s young Ghanaian pop artists, overdubbing is the norm. This is why some bands now cannot reproduce on stage what they have recorded in a multi-track studio. For example, a synthesized trumpet may appear on a studio recording of a band that has no trumpeter. As a result the band has to mime to its own works on television or even on live stage.

This brings us to a third major problem arising from modern recording and production methods: nowadays, there is little or no direct contact between the performers and their audience. Many older Ghanaian musicians will tell you that some of their ideas have been drawn from the immediate response of their audiences during performances. For instance, formerly singers responded to comments from their audience, or a rhythmic dialogue would take place between the percussionists and dancers. These are age-old folk traditions here in Ghana and elsewhere in the world. A fourth negative consequence of machine music in Ghana is that the clear human voice has been compromised by electronic gadgets such as harmonizers, phasers and double-tracking, and by the fact that the sound level of the singers is often very low as compared with the instrumental background. The sound of the human voice is literally getting lost in the ghostly electronic mix.

Last but not least of these problems is the fact that drum machines and synthesizers are putting percussionists and horn players out of work. For now all the sounds that these musicians supply can be simulated by one musical technician.

All these problems which are now being faced in Ghana began to effect the West in the early 1980s with the fashion of the computer generated disco music of groups like Kraftwork, Munich Machines and Donna Summers, all playing at an exact 154 beats per minute. However, over the last few years in Europe and North America there has been some reaction against modernistic machine music. One such reaction is a Western back-to-roots movement in which European and American youth have turned partially away from modern sounds towards folk music, non-Western World Music and the recycling of old pop songs from the past. Paradoxically, part of this recycling of the past uses the most advanced techniques. One current trick is the electronic sampling of the sounds of old stars like James Brown and Jimmy Hendrix, and the grafting of their phrases, shouts and guitar-licks into current works. (This, creates enormous copyright problems regarding the length of a sample in order for it to be copyrightable).

A second response of Western artists to electronic inputs has been to ‘unplug’. Pop stars such as Neil Young and Eric Clapton unplug their electric instruments and play acoustically. Further, when a drum machine is now used in America and Europe, complementary live percussion (such as hi-hats, timbales and congas) are usually added. An instance is the work of Michael Jackson. In the early 1980s his songs were backed percussively by drum machines alone. But his later recordings use a drum machine on one track and a live drummer on another, carefully blended together to produce a live feel.

A third recent response by Western musicians has been their attempt to humanize electronic music. Ironically, all these effects depend upon the increased sophistication of digital equipment, in particular the increase in ‘quantization’. This is the division of a musical measure into incredibly tiny metronomic beats, pulses or kicks. For example Michael Stewart (1987) has devised a ‘feel spectrum’ for livening up digitally sequenced music. If the drummer plays a few milliseconds ahead of the digital pulse he calls it ‘snappy’; if he plays behind, it is called ‘groovy’. Likewise David Jaffe (1985) uses ‘tempo perturbations’ that stagger the attack of the played note in relation to the exact metronomic pulse or kick. Meanwhile Kalle Nemvalts (1988) creates degrees of ‘swing’ by allowing the duration of the played drumnote to fill differing percentages of the spaces between digital pulses. Travis Charbeneaue (1989) utilizes ‘time-shifting adjustments’ to strike the 64th note ahead of the electronic pulse or behind it. All these rhythmic displacement tricks are attempts to simulate human imprecision, inaccuracy, ambiguity, leeway, and generally to create a more authentically live feel in otherwise mechanically exact electronic rhythms. Another way musical technology is being ‘humanized’ in the West is through the use of MIDI devices (Musical Digital Interface) that operate between a musical instrument and a computer. These are played in real-time, not the pre-set quanticized time of drum machines. An example is the DRUM KAT, which consists of special electronic MIDI pads that are beaten with drumsticks, just like an ordinary drum. The drum strokes create an electronic signal that triggers off the computer’s digitally generated or sampled sound. An extension of this idea is found with the Bodysynth. This device is used by the American musician-composer Laurie Anderson. Electronic sensors are stuck all over the artist’s body and are triggered by the movement of the musician’s or dancer’s muscles. Thus the whole human body becomes a musical instrument.

So in spite of the West’s general fascination with electronic sounds, recent moves have been developed by musicians and composers to reassert themselves in the three ways just described: via the Western back-to-roots trend, the performance of ‘unplugged’ pop stars, and the humanizing of music software programs.

After an initial flirtation with local hi-tech popular music during the 1980s, the electronic music scene is beginning to change in Ghana. In 1992 there were audience protests over the low-cost, locally produced, ‘lip-synched,’ music videos broadcast by Ghana Television (GTV) on the nation’s then only television channel during Saturday evening primetime. In response, Ghana Television began a program of live dance band music called "For Your Dancing Feet" which is still running. In the early 1990s there was also a slight waning of the ‘spinners’ craze amongst the youth and the emergence of a new generation of ‘highlife’ bands who play for live dances, including The Golden Nuggets, Western Diamonds, the current Marriots Band, Ankobra and Nakorex. Old-time style ‘highlife’ dances have also been organized by the ABC Brewery and the Ghana Television Club-House, specializing in the highlife classics of the 1950s and ‘60s. Cassette releases of old evergreen highlife favorites have recently been coming on the market as well, including those by The Black Beats, Tempos, African Brothers, Kakaiku, Alhaji Frempong and The Kumasi Trio.

The legal side of this interface of traditional music and modern technology appears with special clarity with regard to the oral tradition and the issue of copyrights.

The idea of copyright first appeared in 16th century Europe in connection with book publishing. In the 18th and 19th centuries copyrighting was extended to a wider technology and to the fine arts. Because of its origin the notion of copyright carries three basic Eurocentric assumptions:

1. A specific artwork or intellectual idea is created by a single or fixed set of particular individuals; its author is therefore easily identifiable.

2. Older artistic forms rooted in pre-industrial peasant society (i.e. folklore) are public property, because their authors are unidentifiable, hence anonymous.

3. In accord with English law (on which much of Ghanaian contract law is based) there can be no copyright unless a work has been written down, recorded or otherwise reduced to material form. This is a clear reflection of copyright’s origin in book publishing.

Since the 19th century, when copyright really became effective in Europe, there has been a clear demarcation between anonymous folk music, on the one hand, and popular or classical works that are composed by identifiable contemporary individuals on the other. The term ‘folk music’ applies to pre-industrial art forms publicly owned and preserved in museums and archives — in contrast to individually and privately owned artistic and intellectual creative works. Thus in Europe the realms of the folk-music archivist and the copyright official do not overlap. However, in many non-industrial countries (including those in Africa) there is a living folk tradition simultaneously co-existing with privately owned, creative works. Outside Europe the realms of folklore and copyright do overlap. Indeed the very (European) concept of ‘folklore’ has to be re-assessed in the context of non-technocratic cultures. Moreover, in Ghana and many other African countries art and cultural works are often not written down nor materialized in any way; they constitute part of a persistent living oral tradition.

There are four specific problems in applying to Ghana and other African countries European assumptions about ‘folklore’ and ‘copyright’:

In a speech by Dr. Mohammed Ben Abdullah, Secretary of the National Commission on Culture at the 1991 Inauguration of the Ghana Folklore Board of Trustees, folklore was defined to be:

Varieties of folkloric or folkloric-inspired Ghanaian musical genres includes the following:

1. Traditional music, dance, drama and poetry that have been created either communally or so long ago that it is beyond the reach of copyright (75 years since the death of the composer(s)). This is ‘folklore’ in the sense defined above by Dr. Abdullah above.

2. Modern neo-traditional genres (such as Kpanlogo, Akpalu, Borborbor, among others) whereby individual or group composers can be identified and fall within the copyright period (i.e. the composer(s) may be still alive, or the 75 years since their death has not elapsed).

3. Popular dance-music that draws heavily on traditional tunes, forms and poetry: this category includes all contemporary dance bands, guitar bands, concert-party bands and cultural groups that employ combinations of traditional and modern instrumentalists. These groups play music based on traditional highlife, adowa, agbadza and other folkloric genres, using traditional melodies, poetry, proverbs, lullabies, children’s songs, ceremonial songs, work songs, war songs and funeral songs.

4. Popular Ghanaian music of dance and guitar bands that incorporates folkloric or popular music elements from other African countries, with or without a Ghanaian folkloric content: examples include the local Ghanaian use of ‘Congo Jazz’, South African Kwela music and Senegambian griot music.

5. ‘Serious’ or ‘Art’ music that draws heavily on the traditional motifs mentioned in (3) above, but is composed, scored and orchestrated for piano or symphonic orchestras.

6. ‘Serious’ scored and orchestrated music that includes elements from the folklore of other African countries, with or without a Ghanaian component, such as Pan-African compositions.

7. Commercialized folkloric music used for cabarets and the tourist trade.

8. Government/para-statal/university traditionally oriented dance ensembles that are performed on stage and are professionally choreographed. This is the nearest Ghanaian equivalent to the preserved form of ‘folklore’ found in Europe and in the United States.

9. European folkloric elements that are incorporated into Ghanaian music. An example is local Ghanaian gospel music that sometimes uses the melodies of old European hymns and folksongs.

The European Division of Musical Components that Accrue Copyright Composer Royalties. In the West, composer royalties are divided so that 50 percent goes to pay for the lyrics and 50 percent for the music or melody. In African music, rhythm is so important that royalties should be broken down into three components, namely, lyrics (33 percent), melody (33 percent), and rhythm (33 percent). This issue of distribution of entitlements becomes even more complex when one takes into consideration the fact that African music is often polyrhythmic. That is, not just one but multiple rhythms and cross melodies are used simultaneously. This very complexity created a serious dilemma at the 1981 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPA) held in Amsterdam. Two officials of an American copyright organization became very excited about a snippet of the tune "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" that they heard in one of Ebeneezer Obey’s Nigerian Juju songs. They insisted that the American composer should be compensated by the Nigerian one. It was pointed out, however, that they had heard only one of several melodies that were going on simultaneously in the music. There was a Juju refrain, a palm-wine-music guitar riff, a Hawaiian style of guitar, a touch of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, not to mention the melody of Obey’s own voice. So talking about royalties for snatches of a cross melody in polyrhythmic music becomes very difficult indeed, especially for people not trained to hear multiple rhythms. A final point about multiple components is that African music is usually associated with specific dances. So in the African situation, royalty-accruing components could be even further subdivided into four categories, namely: the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm and the dance-step. African musical composition is far more intricate and subtle in this respect than the simple Western division of components into lyrics and melody.

Ghana’s PNDC 110 Copyright Law of 1985 vests works of Ghanaian anonymous folklore in the state for perpetuity and prohibits their use without the permission of a government Secretary (i.e. a Minister of Parliament) who may charge a fee. This ministerial function was taken over by the Ghana Folklore Board of Trustees when it was inaugurated in 1991. For instance, in 1991 the Ghana Folklore Board received royalties from the American singer Paul Simon for his use of the folkloric melody "Yaa Amponsah" for the "Spirit Voices" song on his Rhythms of the Saints record album of the late 1980s. However, due to an ambiguity in the PNDC Copyright Law 110, there is no distinction as to whether it is a foreigner or a Ghanaian national who has to gain permission and pay a fee before using folklore. In 1996 the Folklore Board decided to extend its initially sensible and just policy of collecting royalties from foreigners for Ghanaian folklore to Ghanaian nationals themselves. This extension of the law to Ghanaians will have at least four negative consequences, listed below.

In short, the imposition of copyright regulations to constrain Ghanaians attempting to use their own folklore will prevent the commercialization, adaptation and development of Ghana’s own indigenous musical heritage. This will wholly discourage the overall promotion of that heritage — in contrast with the renaissance of musical traditions that has occurred in Western countries. For in European countries and in the Americas, prohibitive laws are not imposed on nationals using their own folklore, since folklore is considered to be part of the public domain. Ghana will therefore disadvantage itself vis-a-vis these nations by putting an actual disincentive on contemporary Ghanaian musicians who manifestly want to recycle and adapt ancestral works to their own modern era of music.

Possible Negative Consequences for Ghana’s Creative Cultural Development Resulting from Folkloric Fees on Ghanaian Nationals. It is worth spelling out how taxation extracted from Ghanaians for their use of folklore may damage the local contemporary performing arts. Firstly, fee charges for using local resources could lead to an ever increasing adoption of foreign music by Ghanaian artists already heavily under the influence of imported music. Secondly, in order to circumvent such taxes, Ghanaian musicians may resort to utilizing African musical styles found outside Ghana that resemble Ghanaian ones (e.g. the Agbadza, Adowa, Tigari and Dagarte folklore). To illustrate this potential problem, we can imagine the 18th century when there was a living folklore in Britain as there is now in present-day Ghana, with an area of artworks being created by known individuals. Suppose an alien agency had suddenly appeared in Britain at that time and persuaded the King and Parliament to ‘nationalize’ and tax their folkloric works. This would have been a calamity for subsequent British popular and classical music, particularly that of the ‘Romantic’ composers of the 19th century since much of their work was based on their own local folklore. As a result, British Romantic composers might have gone to other European countries where the tax law did not apply, and consequently they would have helped to develop those other national cultures instead of their own.

The State Versus the Locality. There is yet another foreseeable negative consequence of the Ghanaian state collecting royalties and granting permission for Ghanaians to use their own folklore commercially. It may lead to a future full of conflicts between the central government and ethnic regional leaderships over the ownership of folkloric works produced in a particular province. The state claiming univocal ownership of all Ghana’s anonymous folkloric works could create tensions with groups that have communally created and established distinct genres of folklore. In the case of performance, such groups would include musical families, age-sets, asafo (warrior) companies, traditional religious cults, secret societies, musical clubs and guilds, and chiefs’ courts. For instance, the goje or one-stringed fiddle music of the Dagomba people of northern Ghana is in the hands of specialized praise-singing guilds composed of men who hand down their skills and repertoires to their sons. Another case in point is the adowa, kete and other drum-dances, which belong to the Asante royal court in Kumasi.

1. Part I of this chapter is based on a paper presented by the author at the Composers’ Forum and Workshop of the International Center for African Music and Dance, at the University of Ghana, Legon, August 9-13, 1994. Part II is based on a presentation given by the author at the National Workshop on Copyright organized by the Ghana Copyright Administration and National Commission on Culture in Accra, October 1991.

2. For instance in Holland, with around 50 US dollars one can go to a special instant-music studio for a couple of hours, buy a readymade rhythm, do a voiceover and walk out with a record.

3. Here are some journalistic examples of both foreign and Ghanaian disdain for current hi-tech Ghanaian popular music. The Stern’s African Record Center Tradewinds magazine (Vol. 5, No. 5 September/October 1994, London) praised the Ghanaian highlife musician Jewel Ackah for not featuring "that horrible cheap drum machine that seems to be everywhere (in Ghana) recently." Baba Abdullai, writing about the Danish `Image of Africa `96 Festival’ in an article entitled `Why Highlife Wasn’t There’ (Ghana Weekly Spectator, July 13th, 1996, p. 4 ) suggests the reason the festival organizers picked Senegalese and Malian musicians and not Ghanaian ones is that the former "rely heavily on percussion (whereas) our highlife is weak on percussion and heavy on digital sound." Dave Yowell of the Sultan recording-studio in London, which often records Ghanaian artists, complained in a Ghanaian Statesman article called `Let’s Hear It Live’ (May 21st 1995, p. 10) that "in West Africa now, it seems there is too much emphasis on the use of computers . . . when you only have a singer and a computer you have the personality of the singer and zero personality of the computer." In an article called "Singing the Blues" in the West African Journal (Dec. 18, 1996, p. 1286), K. Krante bemoans modern Ghanaian highlife saying that "reeling off a string of wise sayings over a computer-generated soundtrack should not automatically confer hit status on the song or singer. . . . It seems that mediocrity has been elevated almost to an art. Technology has contributed more than its fair share to the situation. Twenty years ago real live musicians would have been needed to cut an album."

4. Many musicologists refer to this subjective and flexible side of jazz playing. Thomas Owens (1974) observed that the measures of the jazz saxophonist, Charlie Parker, fluctuated throughout his performances. Richard Waterman (1952) saw these features of improvisation as a result of the musicians’ own "internalized metronome sense." Charles Keil (forthcoming) and Joe Progler (forthcoming) call minute and subtle offbeatings "participatory discrepancies." Peter Reinholdsson (1987) has used a fixed metronome to demonstrate the anticipation (`push’) and delay (‘laidbackness’) of the beat by various jazz bassists. Paul Berliner has recently written a full book on this topic, Thinking Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation.

5. Two other Ghanaian examples of obscured attribution of oral artistic property are the Kpanlogo and Borborbor neo-traditional dance-music styles. These are often regarded in Ghana as anonymous folkloric works of the Ga and Ewe people respectively. However, Kpanlogo was created around 1962 in Accra’s Bukom Square by Otoo Lincoln, together with drummers Okulay Foes and Ayitey Sugar, and dancer Frank Lane. It was Otoo Lincoln and his group who composed the songs ‘ABC Kpanlogo’, ‘Alolodzan’ and ‘Ayine Mombiye,’ cf. Collins (1992; 1996, chapter 4). Borborbor is an Ewe recreational music that was created in Kpando in the Volta Region around 1950 by the Kpando Konkoma Group. One of its leaders was Francis Cudjoe Nuatro or ‘F.C.’ who wrote ‘Mabia Dzogbe Nye Se’ (Badasu, 1988).

6. Speech typescript, p. 2.

7. P. 11.

8. Anyidoho and Tsikata, (1988).

9. Ibid., p. 8.

10. Ghana Copyright News, November 1990.

11. P. 4.

12. Op.cit. (1988).

13. Other economic difficulties directly consequent upon the degradation of culture are detailed by Anyidoho in "Culture and the Human Factor in African Development," this volume.

14. WIPO Report, p. 10.

15. Ibid., p. 11.

16. Anyidoho and Tsikata, (1988), p. 8.

17. At the time of writing this essay the Ghanaian Copyright Administration was in the process of putting forward to Parliament a revised Copyright Bill that included extending the folkloric tax imposed on foreigners to Ghanaian nationals. However, since mid-1997 a number of local music and artistic organizations have strongly objected to this.