Today these imbalances have been partly attenuated in a situation that is, however, still confused with inadequate national and international regulations. The question is now being couched in new terms compared to the past, also as regards the relationship between musicians and researchers. Until recently, researchers raised the question of protecting musicians, unaware of the mechanisms underlying the distribution of copyright resources. They argued for the recognition of authorship even for musicians who do not write down music. But now the contexts in which oral-traditional music is performed pose new ethnographic questions for researchers. In fact, the musicians themselves “register” their music or the traditional names of their music with the copyright offices, thus triggering off unprecedented new trends throughout the country.

The seminar sets out to reflect on these trends by considering how, in the circulation of increasingly spectacularised, heritagised and mediatised music (including so-called traditional music), musicians claim authorship, at times “taking possession” of collective assets shared by their own community. If, on one hand, they are justified in selling on the music market, given that their role has long been undervalued or not recognised, on the other, their individual action can lead to strong disagreements and contradictions in their community, given that what they perform is the result partly of their creativity and authorship but also partly a shared heritage, based on models of collective creativity and the circulation of oral-tradition music that folk experts and ethnomusicologists have been studying and describing for a long time. From this point of view, the role of researchers changes radically due to the fact that they often deal with musicians’ individual demands and strongly contrasting contexts in which they are sometimes even asked to intervene. This raises the new ethnographic issue mentioned in the title of the seminar: how and to what extent can oral-tradition music be considered a product of individual creativity rather than of the community that shares its performance practices? What developments are there at local level as a result of these new trends? In what ways and in what forms, can carefully weighted regulations be introduced to recognise authorship and economic rights for the creative process and the re-elaboration of a tradition by musicians, yet at the same time safeguard a community’s rights over its common Heritage?