[Benjamin Smedberg:]
>> especially if I had worked it right through the texture of an extensive
>> passage of music, I would have been faced with an awkward decision: do I just
>> let the possible quotation stand - or do I throw away a lot of music which
>> uses that theme (or derivations or developments of it)? An alternative might
>> be to keep the passage, but change it in such a way as both to keep the
>> integrity of
>
>What is wrong with leaving the quotation from Sibelius? One melodic
>fragment does not a Sibelius symphony make;
It would have been a fairly prominent fragment to someone who knows the
symphony well.
>composers have from the beginning borrowed (consciously and unconcsiouly)
>melodic and harmonic ideas from eachother without shame, and current copyright
>law (through "fair use" doctrine) keeps this perfectly legal.
It wasn't especially the legal aspect I was worried about, since I never
thought it would become a legal issue if I had used the idea. Since it wasn't
an exact quote anyway, but a bit different, I suppose that would have worked in
my favour if it ever threatened to become a legal issue, which was not what
decided me against using it anyway.
What about the artistic issue? I am quite aware that many composers have
borrowed short (and sometimes not-so-short) snippets, even without acknowledging
them sometimes, but in no way trying to hide them either.
I suppose the level of quoting, or rather the obviousness of it, in this
case would have been about similar to Ives' use of the famous four notes from
Beethoven's 5th Symphony in his Piano Sonata no. 2, "Concord". The quote there
is shorter, but utterly distinct (and deliberately prominent in the context of
Ives' music - it had programmatic meaning in the context of what the Sonata was
depicting); my quote was about 3 bars and about 9 notes long, not precise, no
more prominent than any theme I might have written myself, and would have been
worked into surrounding textures as if it were a theme of my own (as for quite
some years I believed it to be), not hammered out the way Ives did with his 4
notes. But, with my quote being both a bit looser and a bit longer than Ives'
Beethoven quote, these effects would have just about cancelled each other out,
so that the prominence of it would have been about at the same level (to someone
who knew the Sibelius theme) as in the Ives work. (The resemblance to that
Sibelius theme, and to no other theme, is quite unmistakeable.)
But I didn't conceive it as a Sibelius quotation, but fully as a theme of
my own - so when I discovered that it was a quote, even if not a totally exact
one, it quite destroyed the whole way I had been thinking about the idea. I am
just glad that I had never actually done anything with it.
The reason I don't want to quote it it is perhaps purely a personal one: I
just don't quote material, since what I compose is my own work, not someone
else's. This position I take is not a statement that I think what I can do is
better than whatever I might borrow - just a reflection of the fact that, in
composing, my business is to compose my own ideas, not use others' ideas. I am
trying to express my own ideas and feelings, evoke my own imaginative world; and
I don't consider that using material composed by others helps me do that. It's
just a thing I feel, and I guess it's difficult to explain, like a lot of
personal aesthetic standards are.
Possibly my reasoning sounds a bit subjective and vague, put in words like
that, but it's just the way I feel about it. In exactly the same kind of way, I
would never borrow a folk tune - even though that's extremely common, and
apparently perfectly acceptable both legally and artistically (with or without
extensive modification, unusual harmonization, and the like). The very most I
would do would be to compose an original theme in folk idiom, if I wanted to
evoke that kind of feel. So the issue with me is not even primarily the
violation of someone else's personal property, but rather feeling that my own
work really is my own work.
The funny thing (which some may find inconsistent) is that I don't mind
being influenced by a general style or idiom, and do not especially value great
originality of style (one of the more over-rated aspects of art, in my opinion,
although not that I deprecate it, either).
I tend to regard general idioms as the common property of anyone who wants
to draw upon them; but actual quotations, especially of melodies, I tend to
regard as irreducibly the individual property of those who devise them.
>One of my favorite quotes from Handel: someone asked him why he had stolen
>an entire aria from another composer, and he replied "well, he didn't know
>what to do with it!"
I have heard that if Handel were alive today he'd quite likely be in jail
for copyright infringement. But I suppose the idea of quoting from other
composers, even quite extensively, was artistically and legally more acceptable
in Handel's day than it is now.
To counter this, here is a story I once read about Rossini. Another
composer (one version of the story says it was Meyerbeer) came to Rossini with
some of his recent music, and asked Rossini to give an opinion of it.
Rossini said something along the lines of: "This music is both great and
original. However, the parts that are great are not original, and the parts
that are original are not great."
Regards,
Michael Edwards.
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