See the two old boys, stopping by the Eugene symphony to take in some horn music the other night. Imagine them slapping the snow off of their parkas with their stetsons before they settle down in their seats somewhere in the back of the hall where they can put their boots up on the seats in front of them. Since they came for the horns, they might not have paid much attention to the opening piece, which happened to be the Pacific Northwest premiere of “Sidereus,” a new work by Grammy Award-winning composer Osvaldo Golijov.
But, in this particular case, the old boys were veteran insiders of the classical music scene, Tom Manoff, a National Public Radio classical music critic who lives in Eugene, and Brian McWhorter, a trumpet player from New York who teaches music at the University of Oregon. They fell by the symphony to catch F.J. Haydn's trumpet concerto, played by the evening’s featured performer, Andrew Balio, but, when they heard Golijov's nine-minute piece, they immediately realized large parts of the composition were identical to passages in "Barbeich", a 2009 composition by accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman they'd been working on recently. Manoff blogged about the similarity of the pieces at his web site, and Bob Keefer of the Register-Guard picked up the story and gave it legs.
Manoff says at least half of the piece he heard the Eugene Symphony play is known to him as Ward-Bergeman's "Barbeich." I'd make that about 4 1/2 minutes of Ward-Bergeman.
So what's the big deal? What makes it our business how a couple of friends like Golijov and Ward-Bergeman decide to exploit their material? Either way, we get the music. Aren't we short of good stuff to listen to?
And what about the 35 orchestras that commissioned the work? Aren't they a little embarrassed to have bought a recycled composition? Are they circling the wagons? Are they going to keep performing the piece?
Will we ever know what really happened? Will we ever learn exactly what caused a top composer to incorporate so much of a collaborator's work into a commission? Was he running a little late and decided to borrow Ward-Bergeman's homework?
I'm pulling for an inside-outsky version with Golijov lending the work to Ward-Bergeman way back when, then using Ward-Bergeman's improvements in "Sidereus." Or maybe Golijov is Ward-Bergeman's front. Golijov looks more like a composer. And who is going to take the hyperaccordion seriously? Sounds like something from Desolation Row.
Or maybe Golijov and Ward-Bergeman are doing some kind of send up of the classical music world. I've heard that Golijov incorporated a fake Kafka quote into the program notes for one of his compositions. What are 4 1/2 minutes of a buddy's work compared to that?
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23 comments:
Let's say you're the head of an orchestra and you go to your donors and ask for money to present the Golijov piece. You do so on the composer's reputation as a serious fellow. In your wildest dreams you don't expect to get a work in which half of it was composed by someone else.
-Manoff
Seems to me you guys would be worried about the blowback here. Didn't you read the Emperor's New Clothes? At the very least, you're going to have to start buying tickets to those concerts.
Sidereus includes more than half of the music heard in Barbeich, but both pieces have different titles and are attributed to the two different men. Ward-Bergeman said that a mutual agreement of some kind was reached.
Based on my limited understanding of complex copyright law, it doesn't seem this is a situation of "joint ownership," which would "entitle each composer to all the rights of authorship that an individual author would be entitled to." I doubt Ward-Bergeman is getting royalties for Sidereus or the other way around. But who knows.
In trying to understand all this, here's what it looks like to me: It seems that it's likely that these two composers arrived at some mutually accepted agreement leading Ward-Bergeman to either sell or give a large portion (more than half, possibly closer to two thirds) of his work to Golijov for later use. Ward-Bergeman chose to retain his originally conceived work under his own title. He clearly didn't abdicate his ownership in their agreement, since his name and piece are up at his website. Golijov used that mutually agreed upon portion, made additions and wrapped it up in a new title and delivered it to 35 orchestras as the piece they commissioned for 2010 written by HIM.
So regardless of whatever deal was struck between the two composers I see it like this: If I'm paying lots of money to get an original painting and I find out that half the painting was painted by someone else, am I entitled to get my money back because no one told ME about some behind closed doors mutual agreement? I thought I was getting the real deal. What if you paid for a super expensive brand of French wine and the owner of the restaurant sneaks in a not so well known California label just cause he ran out of the French wine? He doesn't tell you though. The thing is the California wine is really good and maybe better than that fancy bottle you had payed for. But you paid for something you didn't get.
Looks to me like those 35 orchestras might be really pissed off and should get another free piece out of this!
Blowback ? No music critic would pass on this I'd hope. Imagine passing on it and it comes to light later that I did. That would be blowback of another sort.
McWhorter is immune from external forces or opinions.
What I find most interesting is that the situation you describe reminds me of something, but I can't quite remember what it is. It's like having a word on the tip of my tongue I can't spit out. If I were fictionalizing it, I'd generally suppose a famous person, a writer maybe, drying up and hiring a ghost, or a couple of ghosts even, to do his or her writing. I have to confess I suspect a lot the famous best-selling authors who grind out big book after big book actually operate that way. But that's not quite it. There is even a better example of somebody giving or selling someone else something they present as their own, but I can't bring it to mind.
S says it's like the fashion industry. The brand is everything. Individual designers who work for the brand may rise to fame as a designer for X -- but when the line comes out, it carries X's name.
Has classical music gone the way of the fashion industry?
"Individual designers who work for the brand may rise to fame as a designer for X -- but when the line comes out, it carries X's name."
In a way, I think this idea is very cool - and properly framing it would be one of the most innovative things to happen for classical music in a long time. Imagine if a company of classical composers churned out pieces for orchestras and chamber groups TOGETHER - and the credit went to the whole company - Gucci or Prada - or even something like Gnarls Ba
The Eugene Symphony's reaction to the issue as quoted in the local paper was absolutely infuriating: "we were happy with the piece, and the audience seemed to like it, too."
WTF? That wasn't the question, was it? An absolutely arrogant response that shows contempt for their audience by refusing to engage the issue honestly.
One segment of classical music has gone Hollywood style. Sign the right team. Get that working musician in fast to ghost the music. Golijov is known for not making deadlines. Also look at who the piece was dedicated to...
Speaking strictly as an outsider, I'd say the orchestras that missed the provenance have egg on their faces and will be happy to see the episode end. Be interesting to seen how the ones who haven't performed the piece handle the situation. Among other things, puts me in mind of Warhol's Factory. Certainly, we never imagined Warhol's Dracula was a film by Warhol. Easy to see in retrospect that Warhol adopted a fashion industry model. I hesitate to call it a Hollywood model, because of the scale of the projects. Another thought I've had is that the Japanese use boards of experts to fix the provenance of old swords, and the issue is often whether an unsigned piece is actually by the master himself or by someone in the master's school, i.e., "den." So a sword can be attributed to the master Yukimitsu, or to Den Yukimitsu. Big difference. Maybe we're looking at a new role for classical music critics.
In my opinion, the credit isn't really the problem. Bergeman obviously knows what happened, his name is in the program, it's had the potential to do him a lot of good. The problem is that 35 orchestras put up thousands of dollars that included grant money to commission an original work and wound up with a 3 year old piece, with all due respect to Bergeman for a great piece, from something of a nobody. They paid for a Golijov, but for all intents and purposes what they got was a Bergeman. And there's really no questioning that. The scores are nearly identical for large portions. Having worked on the Bergeman piece in studio myself for many hours, it was obvious after about 1 minute of Golijov piece that I was hearing something id heard before. It all just seems kind of lazy and underhanded to me.
Anybody got an address for these 35 orchestras? I got this great piece 50% done, could really use some cash to finish it up.
Also, would really be good if they like Brahms.
Well, speaking strictly as an outsider, it does seem that "Den Brahms" would be a little more prestigious than "Den Ward-Bergeman", doesn't it?
The issue is certainly with Golijov's not delivering the goods as commissioned and quite manifestly not owning up to this. His comments at Boosey really give a quite different impression of the genesis of Sidereus than appears at this point to be the reality. This isn't, in most books, honest. And clearly most of the symphony orchestras involved have sold the piece as an original Golijov. Since they presumably didn't know it wasn't his, this marketing wasn't dishonest. However, sadly, the managers of at least some of these orchestras are now defending Golijov with all sorts of hair-splitting. This is unfortunate.
I too was amazed by the Eugene Symphony's response. As in Memphis, Atlanta, Baltimore and elsewhere, Sidereus was marketed in Eugene as a new Golijov. The company really ought to be concerned that it has been, unknowingly perpetrating a falsehood. Instead, they blandly respond that "the audience liked it". This does not champion classical music, it demeans it. Most people I know don't like being fooled.
An interesting day...
A little blowback energy is getting through the cracks. Suddenly I'm self aware at Billy's safe house.
@JRalph
I am extremely happy to see you posting here. I hope the conversions lead to the many areas about which you so often write with profound insight.
Billy Glad is one of the smartest guys I know and I'd give away all my wide-screen tvs for half his writing skills-so having you two in the same forum is great. Tom
@Tom
Haha! When your tickets start disappearing from will call, don't say I didn't warn you.
Nah.....
I pay for most of them in America these days..
Yeah. But those are the ones they'll lose. Not to worry, though. I'll stand you to a ticket. But you really will have to sit in the back.
I'd like to second what JRalph had to say about Golijov's comments at Boosey. As the program note writer for the Eugene Symphony, I feel suckered, because the omission of that crucial detail essentially falsified what I had to say about the provenance of the piece.
Incidentally, when I was writing the program note for Azul for the Bach Festival last summer, I left a message on Golijov's office phone at Holy Cross asking if the opening cello motif (a central idea in the piece) was a deliberate quote, as it appears to be, from the beginning of Astor Piazzolla's "Asleep" (one of the Five Tango Sensations). A wholly different order of borrowing, of course, but worth acknowledging. In any event, I never heard anything back.
James McQuillen-
But in these next weeks, he's the guy who has to live with all that nonsense. I want to know if he play's hyper-accordion.
On another subject, I liked your notes for that War and Peace program at ESO, especially what you wrote about Copland. I have a little story about Copland and HUAC I thought of sending your way, and will. You dropped in an important idea. Not sure most folks know the history, but as someone who lived through the McCarthy days, that one line meant a lot to me. Thank you.
Billy. Is there a movie in this ? And if so, who writes the music ? I'd pass on that gig...
Yeah. There's a movie in everything. But I'm afraid the music for this one has already been written.
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