Review by Madison Heying

In the wake of the Napster controversy, literary scholar and composer Andrew Durkin began formulating the conceptual seeds for his Decomposition: A Music Manifesto. He observed that reproducing technology—from the player piano and the gramophone to the Internet and MP3s—had been changing how people listened to music. He had the “suspicion that something important has been ignored or forgotten . . . , obscured by our myths about music.” Myths are the values and beliefs attributed to music and its creators that paint them in a superhuman light. Decomposition was the result of Durkin’s thinking about the ways in which the myths of authorship and authenticity are inexorably shaped by cultural, psychological, economic, and technological factors. If these factors are inescapable, Durkin says, then listeners can—or even must—harness these factors in order to empower themselves to act as creative participants in their musical experiences . . .