LA-land

OK, we confess to finding the following, from this morning's LA Times, to be the most perplexing (“confusing,” the students would say) passage about musicology we remember reading:

Because laws when Gaye wrote the song allowed only the sheet music composition, not the sound recording, to be copyrighted, jurors heard short snippets and a stripped-down version created by Thicke and Williams' musicologist with just Gaye's vocals over a bass line and chords on a keyboard.

 [By sheer coincidence, the curator's music criticism class—all 140 of them—arrives today, last class, at Mr. Thicke and Ms. Cyrus and you-know-what. The rubric [medieval meaning] for the week is “But Is It Music?”]

Stay tuned. We've sent down there for commentary.