Let's spare a belated thought for those neglected victims of musical crime: unsung composers whose work was nicked by famous names.
Can we identify the owners of stolen musical material?
Which unsung composers have had their work stolen time and again?
Can we blow the great composers' sleight of hand in being deceptively derivative, by identifying which of their works make use of a tune, idea, or whatever that was sourced from an unsung composer?
Are we able to finger which major composers are repeat offenders with a whole string of similar offences needing to be taken into consideration?
Can we, maybe, identify whether the thief has simply lifted the stolen material or passed it off as original by altering it?
How about kicking off with some examples, Paul? I can't think of any myself, but suspect you have something in mind.....
Well, whoever wrote "I'm for ever blowing bubbles" stole it from Raff.
Whoever wrote Tchaik 5 also stole the slow movement from JJR. In fact JJR turns out to be the most plundered composer of all time...
Quote from: Alan Howe on Sunday 02 February 2014, 20:25
Whoever wrote Tchaik 5 also stole the slow movement from JJR. In fact JJR turns out to be the most plundered composer of all time...
Which Raff piece are you thinking of here?
Raff 10, slow movement. One of the most obvious and extraordinary instances of musical grand larceny - and often remarked upon.
Evidence here: http://www.raff.org/life/art/influenc.htm (http://www.raff.org/life/art/influenc.htm)
Quote from: Gareth Vaughan on Sunday 02 February 2014, 20:00
Well, whoever wrote "I'm for ever blowing bubbles" stole it from Raff.
I'm sure it's obvious but, try as I may, Gareth, I can't figure this one out. Please explain.
Also, whilst Raff is in the "plunder-ee" spot, anyone familiar with BBC Radio Four's "Sailing By", used to introduce the old Shipping Forecast, will recognise the orchestration as a straight lift from the Barcarole in Raff's Italian Suite, plunderd by Ronald Binge.
Has anyone here noticed that the opening 6 notes of Rontgen's 5th Symphony sound very much like the 1st 6 notes of Raff's 4th? Was this intentional on Rontgen's part, or is my mind simply playing musical tricks on me?
'Raiding' must mean more than mere imitation, or general influence, otherwise nobody's innocent. I take it we're talking here about intentional theft - no?
QuoteI'm sure it's obvious but, try as I may, Gareth, I can't figure this one out. Please explain.
I was being a bit facetious, but there is a phrase in the slow movement of the Fantasie-Sonata that reminds me strongly of the opening notes of the "bubbles" song.
If we're going to get into that.....check out the slow movement of (Niels) Gade's Piano Sonata in e. It bares no small resemblance to the popular Bill Evans jazz tune, Waltz for Debbie.
John Williams tops them all. He is a very fine musician, writes great film scores, but let's face it - the early ones especially are highly derivative. The first Star Wars score owes an awful lot to Holst, Ravel, Elgar and more. Years ago there was a great, and very-much-missed, store in Tucson called Jeff's Classical Music Shop. On the wall he had a poster labeled The John Williams Lack of Originality Chart (or something like that) which listed the major themes from Williams' work up to that time (early 80's) and next to it, the composer and work from which the material was "derived". Lot of fun.
But seriously, I can't think of anything in the repertoire which meets this criteria. Although the opening theme of Franz Schmidt's 1st symphony sure bears a likeness to Richard Strauss' Don Juan. Not on purpose.
Speaking of Schmidt, I recall there being discussed a strong similarity between the cello solos in Schmidt's Fourth Symphony and a symphonic poem (?) by Hans von Bulow. I haven't heard the von Bulow work, though.
Also, the main theme of the jaunty final movement of Atterberg's Sixth bears more than a passing resemblance to the secondary theme from The March to the Scaffold from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.
One of the movements of Schmidt's 2nd has a theme that's straight out of Sullivan's 'The Martyr of Antioch' (Marguerite's first solo)
Oh, Schmidt! You naughty boy! ;D
Saint-Saens, it would appear, had a tendency to lift ideas from other composers. The grand tune from the first movement of the 2nd Piano Concerto is said to have come from an unpublished Tantum Ergo of Faure. The big waltz at the end of the 4th Piano Concerto has drawn comment for its similarity to a popular waltz of the day by Offenbach. So much for possibly lifting from sung composers. Did he do it to unsung composers?
Well, consider the famous organ hymn that opens the final section of the 3rd Symphony. A few years ago our own California Jim commented that it sounded suspiciously like the opening theme of Anton Rubinstein's Fantasy in C, Op. 84, a work long consigned to the dusty, unused shelves of a few music libraries. The work has, however, been graced by a single recording. Checking this (I've yet to locate a score), I found Jim was right. The Saint-Saens is simply the parallel third above (or minor 6th below) the Rubinstein: same key, same note durations for the most part.
The familiar Saint-Saens, from...what was it...1883?...has the following, all in quarter notes except as noted:
e'' d'' e'' c'' d'' e'' g'' a'' g'' (this last a dotted whole note), followed by
g'' a'' f'' e'' f'' d'' e'' f'' g'' d'' (the last again a dotted whole and final E-F as eighth notes).
Now the Rubinstein, from 1869, is as follows, again all in quarter notes:
c' b c' a b c' d' e' e' g' e' d' e' b c' d'
Transpose the Saint-Saens down a major third and you have the Rubinstein.
Isnt' that a bit uncanny?
Now we know that Rubinstein and Saint-Saens were friends. It was at Rubinstein's request that Saint-Saens wrote, in 1868, his 2nd Piano Concerto. April of 1870 has Rubinstein in Paris for the French premiere of his new Fantasy, followed by concerts in other major French cities. Then in May Rubinstein returns to Paris where he plays the Schumann concerto under the direction of his friend, Saint-Saens.
Given this chronology and the friendship of the two principles, it seems to me inconceivable that Saint-Saens would have been unaware of Rubinstein's new work. And, given Saint-Saens reputation for allegedly lifting things...well, who knows?
The Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony is a study in thematic and motivic transformation, in the manner of Liszt (to whose memory the work was dedicated). The theme in question, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is a variant on the Gregorian chant Dies Irae. If you listen to the first movement/section of the Saint-Saëns 3rd, you will hear the theme in the exact same form as it appears in the Rubinstein Fantasy, only transposed up a minor 3rd, and harmonized in the minor of the tonality the two works share (C).
Grainger's English Country Gardens is a direct steal from Louis Schindelmeisser's Sinfonia Concertante for 4 Clarinets & Orchestra.
Or did Louis nick the tune from a traditional English folksong?
One of Kit and the Widow's songs pokes fun at Andrew Lloyd Webber, slyly pointing up all the tunes he filched. The refrain goes: "Here's how to write a good West-End tune: steal it from somebody else!"
The opening of Lloyd Webber's "Memory" is exactly the same as the opening of the bass aria "Vedo sei placide lune" from the opera "L'Oracolo" by the little-known verismo composer Franco Leoni. It may not be a coincidence, since the Sutherland/Bonynge recording of the opera came out in 1975, six years before the premiere of "Cats".
A propos Saint-Saens' 2nd piano concerto: the second theme of the second movement is the same as the beginning of the serenade from the "Once Upon a Time" incidental music by P. E. Lange-Müller. But here the thief seems to have been the Danish composer, as his work was written almost 20 years after the concerto.
I once saw an amusing card in a shop in Islington. It had a cartoon of Andrew Lloyd Webber sitting at the piano with some MS paper in front of him and pen poised. One hand hovered over a large book propped up on the music stand of the piano. Its title was "Other People's Tunes". Ouch!!
The first two bars of the Woody woodpecker theme are taken from Schumann's choral ballad Der Königssohn, Op.116.
Quote from: mikehopf on Tuesday 04 February 2014, 09:13
Grainger's English Country Gardens is a direct steal from Louis Schindelmeisser's Sinfonia Concertante for 4 Clarinets & Orchestra.
Or did Louis nick the tune from a traditional English folksong?
Are you serious? Like a large amount of Grainger's work, it is indeed based on a folksong.
Quote from: regriba on Tuesday 04 February 2014, 15:03
The opening of Lloyd Webber's "Memory" is exactly the same as the opening of the bass aria "Vedo sei placide lune" from the opera "L'Oracolo" by the little-known verismo composer Franco Leoni. It may not be a coincidence, since the Sutherland/Bonynge recording of the opera came out in 1975, six years before the premiere of "Cats".
Oddly enough, when I first heard Ravel's Bolero, I though there was a Disney song based off it. It turns out I was thinking of Memory, which indeed does have a very similar line. Even MORE oddly, a couple years later in high school, I heard another school's marching band playing Memory....and I thought it was Bolero (and kinda boggled that a marching band would play such a piece)
The opening bars of "Phantom of the Opera" are a direct crib from Vaughanm Williams' London Symphony.
When I was in a production of West Side Story (many hundreds of years ago), at the end when Maria and we gang-members all sang "There's a Place for Us..." (from the song "Somewhere"), I couldn't help but think I was playing the opening of the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto....
(For the record, I was a Shark. We kicked Jet ***.)
We've had this conversation before, but I'm not eager to dig back through the history of the site to find the thread.
As is usually attributed to Stravinsky, "Good composers borrow. Great ones steal."
Actually, it was not until around the turn of the century that the notion that music should be entirely original in order to be good came about. Up until then, everyone cribbed from everyone else constantly. Handel used music from many other composers, and then Beethoven, Brahms and even Schoenberg borrowed from him. Mozart stole from Beethoven. Strauss stole from Wagner and von Schilling. Wagner stole from Berlioz. Liszt stole from everyone. haha
You find instances throughout music where the same folk tunes get worked into the music of multiple composers from a given culture. Is there any validity to the idea of "I got there first" in such cases? An example is the dies irae, which appeared quite often in the music of Russian composers. Rachmaninoff used it in almost every piece he ever wrotew. Did he steal it from one of the composers who used it before he did?
Fact is, it's just about impossible to put together a string of notes that has not been used by some composer already. So, if a melody is similar to a melody in another work, is it automatically theft?
As for the Tchaikovsky 5th plundering Raff, sorry, but personally, I do not think any audience listener would ever confuse Tchaikovsky's achingly beautiful opening to the 2nd movement of his 5th with the passage written by Raff. They are in a totally different league.
I'm not suggesting it never happened. To the contrary, I'm suggesting it was very common up through the 1800s.
I'm trying to think of cases in which I remember thinking a bit of music by an unsung sounded like a familiar passage from a sung composer. I know I've run across some examples, but I'm drawing a blank right now.
I agree heartily with your Tchaikovsky/Raff comparison. While Raff was obviously a very talented composer, Tchaikovsky was a master through and through. His music grabs me by the throat with its great emotional power, something I can't say Raff's music does for me. So to say Tchaikovsky "plagiarized" Raff is a rather unfair statement IMHO.
Tchaikovsky clearly did plagiarise Raff. But he made what he plagiarised his own, which is what great composers do. However, Tchaikovsky is Tchaikovsky and Raff is Raff: the former's version may grab you by the throat (it doesn't grab me that way, btw), but Raff's original aches gorgeously.
And Raff was a master-composer himself, not a merely talented one. That would be von Bülow.
I used to be puzzled by the fact that, to me, 8 year old Mozart's 2nd and 3rd symphonies, written on his visit to England as a boy prodigy, sounded inferior to his No.1 in E flat, until I read somewhere that he had, as an exercise,copied out the score of a symphony by the mature composer, Carl Friedrich Abel who was then settled in England and putting on concerts in collaboration with Johan Christian Bach who, for a short while, became mentor to the young composer. Of course, much later on in his career, Mozart wrote a slow introduction to a symphony by his colleague Michael Haydn, which later became catalogued as Mozart's Symphony No. 37.
To me, there seems quite an affinity between the finale of Raff's 6th symphony and the scherzo of Parry's 3rd symphony.
Lastly, the refrain of the Victorian music hall song, "Two Lovely Black Eyes", sounds as if it could have been derived from the scherzo of Spohr's 5th symphony.
Can it be proved beyond question that Tchaikovsky ever heard the Raff 5th, or looked at a score? I know he made a comment comparing Raff to Brahms, but to accuse someone of plagiarism requires significant proof, at least for me.
That's an interesting question. Lenore was first performed in Berlin in October 1873 - and Raff's music was apparently often performed in Moscow and St Petersburg in that period:
http://www.raff.org/life/peers/tchaik.htm (http://www.raff.org/life/peers/tchaik.htm)
But the proof's also in the music, I think.
As was pointed out by someone in some British newspaper (I don't recall who it was, when, and where) the opening of the James Bond theme by John Barry is exactly like the beginning of Sibelius Cassazione. Well, Sibelius isn't unsung but perhaps his Cassazione, a work seldom performed or even recorded, is. Of course, it's not at all likely that Barry knew this part of Sibelius' oeuvre; so what we have here is most likely a mildly interesting co-incidence, a sort of minuscule mystery of creation.
Amphissa makes the important point, I think. Given the nature of our 12 note scale, there are a finite number of ways to put together a melody and keep it tonal. Granted, the number of combinations is large, but it definitely is finite. Or would it be permutations? Well no matter, you get the idea.
Jerry
"That's an interesting question. Lenore was first performed in Berlin in October 1873 - and Raff's music was apparently often performed in Moscow and St Petersburg in that period... But the proof's also in the music, I think."
The proof if proof it is (a moot point) is only in the music. Since we don't know if Tchaikovsky was familiar with the symphony at all everything else is assumption, however much we might want it to be true that Tchaikovsky was influenced by the symphony to reinforce (a subjective view of?) Raff's significance. I reckon its a step too far to claim that Tchaikovsky "clearly did" plagiarise on that alone no matter how authoritatively the statement is made. Words like "undoubtedly", "clearly" etc. seem to be used a lot these days to lend an air of objectivity to what are only personal opinions such as that Raff and Tchaikovsky were artists of equal stature... some (and many here at UC) will probably agree about that but many won't and I am one of them. Sorry!
** Sticks head back below parapet! ** ;)
Indeed. Just because this is a forum focused on promoting "unsung" composers doesn't mean we can demean "sung" composers to the benefit of their "unsung" compatriots. I will stick with my opinion that Tchaikovsky was a genius and Raff was a minor master.
I don't think that anyone is denying Tchaikovsky's genius, are they? Neither does according that status to him, necessarily demote Raff to the status of "minor master". There's no either/or in the situation. What does seem to me to be beyond question is the absolutely remarkable similarity in melody, harmony and orchestration of the two passages, that Raff's work predates Tchaikovsky's by several years, and was a very well known and frequently played work at the time. Beyond that, I think it's difficult to go with any certainty. The two passages certainly have many more similarities than quite a few of the examples given here.
Personally, I wouldn't accuse Tchaikovsky, or some of the other "borrowers" cited in this thread of plagiarism, but I am sure that there must have been many instances of a composer thinking an idea was original, when in fact it derives from something heard and subsequently forgotten by the conscious mind. In the Tchaikovsky/Raff case, the passage is an isolated episode in the slow movement of Raff's 10th Symphony, which he doesn't develop. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, uses the idea as the very bedrock on his symphony's slow movement.
Quote from: anssik on Wednesday 05 February 2014, 17:04
As was pointed out by someone in some British newspaper (I don't recall who it was, when, and where) the opening of the James Bond theme by John Barry is exactly like the beginning of Sibelius Cassazione. Well, Sibelius isn't unsung but perhaps his Cassazione, a work seldom performed or even recorded, is. Of course, it's not at all likely that Barry knew this part of Sibelius' oeuvre; so what we have here is most likely a mildly interesting co-incidence, a sort of minuscule mystery of creation.
Well there's no less than twice that Beethoven seems to 'copy' Mozart -- an overture that sounds like the beginning of the Eroica, and a choral work that sounds like Ode to Joy -- but the likelyhood of Beethoven having heard these pieces is almost nil.
Well, my point was not that Tchaikovsky didn't borrow anything from other composers (including Raff).
My point was -- All composers of the era did that. And I would hazard that Raff pilfered from other composers just as they pilfered from him. There was no copyright back then and it was common practice. You see it in all the arts. You see paintings by different artists that are stylistically very much alike and portraying the same content. Even more relevant, consider Warhol's Marilyn diptych. He took a publicity photo from a decade earlier and used it to create his artistic piece.
The pilfering in classical music continues even today, even in this age of obsessive copyright. There have been many articles about Golijov and Adams cribbing from other composers. John Williams is the poster boy for this tactic, though.
The thing is, if Tchaikovsky did use a passage of Raff's as a starting point (1) are we sure Raff didn't get the idea from some other composer? And (2) Tchaikovsky obviously did not simply copy Raff's music, he took an idea (if he did) and created a masterly piece out of it -- and created something that Raff obviously did not think of doing with that bit of music.
Bernstein once provided a very clear discussion of how Wagner took some thematic ideas by Berlioz and crafted the music for Tristan and Isolde from those thematic ideas. Wagner never "gave credit" to Berlioz, just as Strauss never "gave credit" for the ideas he adopted from Wagner.
It was common to do this during that era. It's a big "so what?" issue as far as I'm concerned.
I think that Tchaikovsky knew Raff's music very well. Listen, for example, to the finale of Raff 3 and you'll find a certain march theme that seems to want to morph into the third movement of the Pathétique. I know I only have my ears, but the likeness is very obvious.
I probably shouldn't have used the word 'plagiarism'. What I meant was that the Raff 10/Tchaik 5 case seems like a pretty clear instance of borrowing - whether intentional or not.
And I don't think I ever demeaned Tchaikovsky in favour of Raff. The former is an established great. Raff was certainly that - and I hope to live to see his name 'up in lights' once again.
QuoteTchaikovsky obviously did not simply copy Raff's music, he took an idea (if he did) and created a masterly piece out of it -- and created something that Raff obviously did not think of doing with that bit of music.
I think that's pretty well what I said in reply #27 - except I should have said 'borrowed'...
That Raff/Tchaikovsky example is uncanny. Here's one not mentioned yet.
George Gershwin purloined the tune for "I Got Rhythm" from William Grant Still. Still first wrote the tune while he was playing in the band for Eubie Blake's "Shuffle Along", and working on his Symphony No.1 "Afro-American". Gershwin was a frequent visitor to the show, where he would hear the musicians improvising all sorts of remarkable things. Still was improvising and working out material for the symphony at that time, which is established in his notebooks. Still was apparently shocked to hear his tune turn up in "Girl Crazy", but he used it anyway in the symphony's third movement scherzo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQ0bjXN7pU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQ0bjXN7pU)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ZOAVraaRU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ZOAVraaRU)
Blatant "borrowing" is found in one of Delius's best known works, "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring"; both the melodic material and also its characteristic harmonizations come directly from Grieg's op. 66, no. 14, "I Ola-Dalon, i Ola-Kjonn." Were this movie music, Delius would receive his due in the rolling credits but Grieg would take home the Oscar for the score.
I am quite sure that both the Delius and the Grieg are based on the same Norwegian folksong - hence the similarity. But it is also very possible that Delius got the tune through Grieg, since the two composers were close friends. Actually the Oscar-winner might well be Ludvig Mathias Lindeman, who collected and published many of the folk-tunes used by Grieg.
One of the main themes from John Williams' score for 'Home Alone' appears in the third movement of Ludolf Nielsen's third symphony, almost verbatim. Given how little Ludolf Nielsen seems to have been played, however, it could just be a coincidence.
Then there's that bit in Strauss's 4 Last Songs which provides the theme for "Jesus Christ, Superstar", which is a bit queasy. But one of the unlikeliest links is that the main theme of Rubbra's 8th Symphony is identical to Janacek's "Cunning Little Vixen"!
To further the classical to Broadway link, there's a motif in Richard Strauss's Burlesque which sounds a lot like "Somewhere" from West Side Story.
Talking of Strauss, he makes much use of a descending six note stepwise motif in his Alpine Symphony, which was just as prominently employed by Max Bruch 49 years earlier in the slow movement of his First Violin Concerto.
Here's one to chew on: the last bar of Holst's beautiful song In the Bleak Midwinter is exactly the same as the last bar of the "goin' home" theme from Dvorak's New World. Same rhythm, same notes (allowing for transposition). I would never accuse Holst of stealing it. Just a coincidence. I wonder if he was aware of the close similarity?
Of course it's a full cadence and a reletively standard rhythm. It's not too surprising a pair of pieces would have the same last bit like that.
I believe Beethoven borrowed and modified the opening theme of his Eroica Symphony from one of C F Abel's symphonies.