"Composers don't borrow -- they steal!"

My title is a quote from Stravinsky that I read so long ago I forget the source. But I am reminded of it by a recent controversy that has appeared in connection with a composer whose music I greatly enjoy: Osvaldo Golijov. Here, from Alex Ross, is a brief account. While this may be correct as to the facts of this controversy, it gets a few other things wrong. Ross writes:

Golijov can be defended on the grounds that there is a long history of borrowing and outright theft in classical music. In the Baroque era, Bach, Handel, and other masters routinely recycled their own music and reworked the music of others; the idea of the composer as a singular genius blazing an original path was essentially alien before the advent of Beethoven.

The 'borrowing' that he mentions was not something that began in the Baroque era, of course. In my post yesterday I cited a number of composers who wrote versions of "J'ay pris amours" that used all or some of the original. Using music composed by others was not just an occasional practice, but a typical one from the birth of polyphony on to the present day. There is a notorious example I talk about in this post. Mozart took an entire symphony by Michael Haydn, added a short introduction, touched up the wind parts and passed it off as his own Symphony No. 37. As soon as music printing was invented, and there was money to be made, publishers started passing off music by all sorts of composers as being written by great ones like Josquin des Prez. Scholars have spent a great deal of time sorting out these "misattributions". Incidentally, one of the first composers who was regarded as a 'singular genius' like Beethoven was this same Josquin. Beethoven too is known to have re-cycled some of his earlier tunes from his Bonn period in later works while living in Vienna. And to close the circle, Stravinsky was a frequent user of Russian folk themes in his music, even in the Rite, despite his denials. Beethoven, too used Russian themes in the quartets op. 59. And Golijov, in the notes to an album of string quartets recorded by the St. Lawrence String Quartet says, in reference to his Lullaby and Doina that "The piece ends in a fast gallop, boasting a theme that I stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks."

I suspect that the whole concept of borrowing vs stealing is really not an aesthetic one at all, but purely an economic or legal one. Where there was no actual marketplace for the sale of music as some sort of commodity, before the invention of music printing, for example, there was no stigma whatsoever attached to using material from someone else. Even after the invention of printing composers hand-copied music by other composers and used it for their own purposes. As Ross says, Bach's re-working of Vivaldi is a famous example. As legislation was developed giving creators legal possession of the rights to their music, however, the stigma has grown. And so now poor Golijov finds himself chided for some behind-the-scenes collaboration. As Ross notes, "...the many orchestras involved in the “Sidereus” project may be miffed to discover that the work they commissioned is not exactly brand new."


"Not exactly brand new..." Does anyone else see the ideology lurking behind this? For the last hundred years the 'brand new' has been touted as an absolute good in itself. I've talked about this before, but let me say it again. 'New' is not equal to 'good' and 'good' is what is important. It was pursuit of mere novelty that led to much of the worst music of the last century.


Let's listen to that piece by Golijov, but first the Taraf de Haidouks version of the theme:

Now Golijov:

I think it is safe to say that if a composer steals a melody like this, it becomes a different thing, with new harmonies in a new context.


UPDATE: As this article seems to be attracting a lot of attention, I want to make a couple of things clear that I did not in the post itself. I do NOT condone passing someone else's work off as your own. I thought this would go without saying. What I was focusing on in the post was the interesting phenomenon that music theft only became an issue once ways were found, through printed music and later through recorded music, to commodify music. Before then, all through the long, long Middle Ages and early Renaissance before printing, composers would take chant melodies and use them everywhere. They would take entire polyphonic compositions and do what was known as a 'parody' of all the voices. In other words, before music could be commodified, it was not deemed to have a monetary value, hence the notion of copyright was simply inappropriate. Oh yes, and composers did this, typically, with no credit given to the original composer--supposing they could even be identified...

Young Composers

A post like this is an opportunity to praise young composers irrespective of their music, just for being. Or an opportunity to put them down because I'm in training to be a curmudgeon. Or an opportunity just to report on their existence. Instead of that, I'm going to actually tell you what I think.

Vivian Fung is a Canadian composer, born in 1975, with a doctorate from Julliard (who teaches composition there? --oh, Robert Beaser and John Corigliano among others). She cites as influences Asian music, specifically Javanese and Balinese gamelan. Let's have a listen to her String Quartet No. 2:

Was that a ragged and sloppy performance or is it written that way? Without the score I can't tell. Asian influence, yes. Underpinning it all seems to be the pentatonic theme of the beginning. But I hear a lot of Bartok. Nothing there made me want to hear more. It had the frozen harmony that perhaps comes from a pentatonic structure. The frenzied passages seemed to me merely frenzied, that is, not justified by what preceded them.

Next, Nico Muhly who has been getting commissions right, left and center. He is even younger than Vivian, born in 1981, also a graduate of Julliard in composition. His opera Two Boys just premiered at the English National Opera last summer. Let's listen to a piece from his album Speaks Volumes:

I don't hear much interesting there. I've gotten somewhat allergic to drones lately as they seem to have become a cliche. Speaking of, surely at this point in time the climax achieved by accelerando is also a cliche as is the crescendo on one note? That's what I hear: cliches. True, there is some lyricism in the high violin melodies, which is a good thing. But the form, like that of a rondo with a limp, leaves me cold. Not a very pleasurable or interesting listen.

Both these young composers seem to be composing Standard High Modernism: jagged rhythms, dissonant, the usual rhythmic and dynamic cliches. Take a chunk out of either piece and would it really be distinctive in the way a chunk out of a Beethoven or Shostakovich string quartet would be? And uh, Julliard, isn't this about thirty or forty years out of fashion? Haven't we had post-modernism since and whatever it is we are doing now?

Let's hear something by another not-quite-so-young composer:

Now that has two things the other pieces don't: harmony and a groove...

Composers and Humility

Many composers--Richard Wagner, for example--didn't have a shred of humility and most composers tend not to suffer fools too gladly, but there are some examples of humility from composers that are very striking. One of my favorite quotes is from a letter Beethoven wrote regarding his String Quartet in C# minor, op 131. This quartet is widely regarded as one of the finest, perhaps the finest, ever written. The great musicologist Joseph Kerman says that the finale movement is the most perfect finale in any genre. What did Beethoven say about this superlative work? That it was "less lacking in fantasy than my other music." We find an echo in Osvaldo Golijov who said in an interview: "I'm a second-rate composer, but a really good second-rate composer." That sounds absurd, but it has a lot of truth in it. Golijov is one of the best younger composers writing today, in my opinion, which puts him one rung down from those very, very few first-rate composers: Bach, Beethoven and probably Shostakovich. Others would say Mozart. A few crazy folk would vote for Chopin or Stravinsky or even Wagner, perhaps. Speaking of Shostakovich, there is a great quote from him too. Regarding the first movement of his String Quartet no 15, the last he wrote, he gave a performance suggestion to the quartet in rehearsal for the premiere. The first movement, one of six movements, all adagio, is very static, like a fugue in slow motion, it unfolds very slowly. He said they should play it "so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom".

I know exactly what he means and I love that he said it that way. But the truth is that this movement is transcendent, sublime. Here, have a listen:

How does he do that? From the first note, you are captured. Oh, and here is that finale to the Beethoven C# minor quartet: