Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, "From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · May 11, 2022 · 56m

Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publisher. But, how did that concept originate and why? From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Rebecca Geoffroy Schwinden tackles this question with an insightful examination of the years around the French Revolution when the legal protections for music moved from a system of monopolies granted by the sovereign that regulated music as an activity to a framework that assumed music…