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Advice from the greats: Plagiarism is ‘natural and necessary’ to make groundbreaking music

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The history of rock is one of theft, beginning with Elvis’s debut single.
In Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical film The Squid and the Whale, the young protagonist Walt performs a song at a school talent show that he claims to have written himself. He wins first prize, his girlfriend loves it, and at dinner his overbearing dad says that it reminds him of his second novel.
But of course Walt gets found out. He didn’t write it, Roger Waters did. It’s the song Hey You from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. Confronted by the school therapist, Walt concedes: “I felt I could have written it…so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality.”
It’s something most of us have felt before. Plagiarism as an assertion of identity, a misguided sense that we own the things we love. The composer Igor Stravinsky once referred to this affliction as “a rare form of kleptomania” – plundering of the musical past as raw material for the present.
Stravinsky was doing something quite different to Walt. He refashioned his stolen sources into something new: Russian folk melodies were incorporated into The Rite of Springand material from the classical era gave rise to Pulcinella. And yet Stravinsky tells us that Pulcinella was not only the first of his “many love affairs” with the past, but also “a look in the mirror”. Just like Walt, then, Stravinsky’s plagiarism was a form of deferred and narcissistic self-recognition.
We can look at such acts in one of two ways: either as an unethical infringement of somebody else’s intellectual property or as the symptom of an attitude that underpins creative endeavour across the arts.

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