Be Thou My Vision

This week on Tea with Liya, I'm playing a classic hymn called "Be Thou My Vision." If you haven't been hearing this in a church for 50 years, you might not have imagined that this song has existed for several centuries. Age doesn't make it any less valuable, though - here I am playing it in 2020! 


Listen to the song here
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The lyrics of this song were actually written in the 7- or 800s, before they were translated into English in 1912. That means that this is a very old song indeed. I'm not actually sure how music was written down before the system that we have now, and if there were any written examples, they haven't survived until 2020.

This staff is a perfect curved analog to musical notation... except that it has 6 lines instead of 5. (Yeah, I know. Put that on your long list of things that musicians complain about for no reason.)

If I was looking down at the earth, I might wonder why people invented the system of clefs, flags on notes, and squiggly rests when they could find a more numerical way of measuring note values - rectangles on the staff, for example. However, our current notation system has been the standard for hundreds of years, so changing it now would be like learning that a blue "T" is now the signal to stop your car.

Possibly due to the remarkable age of this hymn, I have heard songs that are quite similar to this one. They obviously haven't broken copyright, though, as they're still being published today.

That brings up the question: what counts as copying? If you and I write somewhat similar songs at the same time, who really owns the idea? Or do we both own it? I can't really claim the rights to something that you came up with completely separately from me. But could my music have influenced you over the years, so that I really caused you to think of the song?

Does anyone have copyright on the copyright symbol?

Or perhaps you heard a song that I wrote, and thought of some ways you could add your own expression into it. You could publish a cover, but now you're thinking of so many things that the finished product will differ significantly from my song. So you decide to publish your own variations as a separate piece of music.

Should I be coming to ask for credit? Or does it count as your original ideas that were simply inspired by my song?

Because we can't see into anyone else's head or know what they were thinking about when they made something, the general principle is that if you write a song that sounds like a copy of mine, then I can claim copyright on it. But maybe that needs to change. After all, you shouldn't have to pay me for something you actually came up with yourself.

In fact, if we were thinking about the same musical ideas at the same time, then neither of us has the right to claim ownership of them.

Here in 2020, digital recordings as well as our (perhaps too complicated) notation system have allowed us to have access to many different styles of music. You can listen to music from all over the world with a couple of clicks. With so many different styles available today, it's still questionable whether it's easier or harder to create original music.

Perhaps it's easier because you have so many options - you can even mix two styles together. But maybe it's harder because all the options already exist - with so many styles here already, how do you make something completely different?

I suppose the only way to understand the experience of writing music is to actually write it yourself. Maybe I should look around on my computer for that folder of "assorted musical ideas...."


Keep filling your teacup with original, undiluted music!
~Liya