Dangerous Undertakings: Judicial Copyright Opinions as Music Criticism

Abstract: This article argues that judicial opinions in US federal music copyright cases can be productively read as a form of music criticism. Although copyright law has formally limited the role of aesthetic judgment since the Supreme Court’s 1903 decision in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., over a century of judicial writing demonstrates that judges routinely evaluate musical quality, originality, and genre in ways that exceed purely legal reasoning. By situating judicial opinions within their historical, cultural, and musical contexts, this essay reveals how judges’ word choices, metaphors, and dicta function as aesthetic critiques that shape interpretations of musical creativity, similarity, and value.

Drawing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century copyright cases involving early jazz, Tin Pan Alley songs, and hip-hop sampling, the article traces patterns of judicial ambivalence toward aesthetic neutrality and persistent elitism toward commercial popular music. These opinions frequently reveal implicit racial, cultural, and moral judgments that influence legal outcomes and the scope of copyright protection. Framing judicial opinions as an understudied archive of music criticism, the article calls for sustained cross-disciplinary dialogue between musicology, law, and forensic musicology to better understand—and mitigate—the “dangerous undertaking” of judicial aesthetic evaluation in music copyright litigation.

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Racializing Sound in Early Jazz: A Case Study on Fletcher Henderson (with help from Lil Nas X)

Abstract: This essay interrogates the racialization of sound in the U.S. music industry by examining how musical style, genre, and listening practices have been historically tethered to racial identity. Centering on early jazz bandleader Fletcher Henderson, the essay situates his career within the volatile racial, economic, and cultural landscape of the 1920s, when recording companies institutionalized racial difference through categories such as “race records” and stylistic labels like “hot” jazz. Drawing on scholarship in music theory, sound studies, and critical race studies, the article demonstrates how Henderson’s classically trained, arranged approach to jazz challenged prevailing assumptions about Black musical “primitivity” and enabled rare crossover success into white popular markets. At the same time, Henderson remained constrained by unequal access, exploitative labor practices, and industry gatekeeping that limited Black musicians’ creative freedom, financial gain, and historical recognition.

The essay places Henderson’s experience in dialogue with the contemporary case of Lil Nas X, whose chart-topping “Old Town Road” was briefly removed from Billboard’s country charts in 2019, revealing the persistence of racialized genre policing in popular music. By tracing continuities between early twentieth-century recording practices and twenty-first-century chart classification, the essay argues that the music industry continues to enforce a “sonic color line” that disciplines Black artists who transgress stylistic boundaries. In doing so, it illuminates how racialized listening practices not only shape markets and careers but also influence the historical narratives that define artistic legitimacy, authenticity, and value. Ultimately, the article contends that examining Henderson’s legacy alongside Lil Nas X offers a critical lens through which to understand the durability of anti-Black logic in American music culture and the ongoing struggle over who is permitted to sound (and be remembered) as universal.

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Jenny Lind and the Making of Mainstream American Popular Music

Abstract: This essay about Jenny Lind’s mid-nineteenth-century American concert tour is a case study for these ways of thinking about musics embedded in culture and the legacy of historical musical-cultural processes. Lind’s status as “ideal” grew from the cultural discourse about her singing voice as gendered, raced and classed. These aspects of identity help us gain a more complete picture of Jenny Lind’s embeddedness in mid-nineteenth century American culture, as well as her appeal as a musical celebrity.

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An Intermedia Approach to Seventeenth-Century English Popular Song Culture

Abstract: This essay sets forth examples for multidisciplinary approaches to seventeenth-century English popular song and its presentations across media by tracing the contextual histories of popular tunes. Historical musicology and literary studies have given priority to notated works written by composers or authors supported by powerful institutions like the church, aristocratic patrons, or the crown. Yet, to truly understand English musical culture means engaging with not only canonical behemoths like the dramatic works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the poetry of John Milton, the Italian operas of G. F. Handel, John Dowland’s lute music, the English virginal school, and ballad opera, but also how these works draw on popular songs circulating in London’s theaters, streets, and homes. Seventeenth-century English popular music and its transmission, reception, and preservation defy the notion of discrete categories of elite and popular, oral and written, high and low, public and private. Our methodologies for studying it should acknowledge this circulation and transformation.

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