From the Washington Post (02/22):
Too Perfect Harmony
How Technology Fostered, and Detected, a Pianist's Alleged Plagiarism
By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 22, 2007; D01
A piece of software used by Apple's iTunes has accidentally sparked a scandal in the classical music world -- and cast a shadow on the reputation of an obscure, deceased British pianist now accused of plagiarism.
The alleged hoax, in which the recorded works of pianist Joyce Hatto have been called into question, was uncovered using database software that automatically identifies CDs so that fans don't have to manually enter artist and track information when they load the music onto their computers. Technology helped enable the alleged trickery; a newer technology uncovered it.
When a reader of the British classical music magazine Gramophone loaded a Hatto disc onto his computer, the database correctly identified it as a performance of a Franz Liszt piano composition -- but marked it as a CD recorded by another pianist, Laszlo Simon. The technology behind the CD database, operated by Gracenote, a California company, indexes data on about 4 million CDs. The lengths of tracks on Hatto's and Simon's albums were identical, causing the database to make what appeared to be a mistake.
Or was it a mistake? The reader contacted a Gramophone critic, who played the Simon recording on iTunes, compared it to the Hatto recording and found that the two CDs sounded the same. The magazine passed the matter to independent sound engineers, who have concluded that the two versions were, in fact, the same performance. Since then, engineers have found at least a dozen examples of other performances that appear to have been pilfered and issued under Hatto's name.
Gramophone revealed its findings on its Web site last Thursday in what it said was an abbreviated form of a story to be published in the magazine's April issue.
Hatto's recordings were published by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, on a small British label called Concert Artist. The label has released more than 100 albums under Hatto's name. Barrington-Coupe yesterday denied any wrongdoing.
"Sound waves don't prove anything," he said. "If the sound waves are giving that impression, I'm at a loss." [My favorite quotes of the story! - Doug]
Barrington-Coupe said that the findings published on the Web , have started a "culture of fear" among critics in London who are afraid to stand up and defend the Hatto recordings now in dispute. "They're being told that something is a scientific fact, and they're no longer believing their ears," he said.
Hatto died last year at the age of 77 after a long battle with cancer. Although she was largely unknown for most of her career, she won a few champions among critics toward the end of her life. A reviewer for the Boston Globe, for example, called her "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of."
Her illness forced her to give up performing in public decades before she died.
One sound engineer consulted for the British magazine's piece found a Hatto recording that he believes is a performance originally attributed to Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima.
"No pianist who's ever lived could replicate a performance to anything like the degree of accuracy heard here; it's simply not humanly possible," Andrew Rose, the engineer, wrote in a recent posting on his Web site, where he has put up clips of the music and side-by-side images of the recordings' sound waves (http://www.pristineclassical.com).
Rose, who works for the audio restoration firm Pristine Audio, wrote that the recordings are alike down to a measurement of "1/44,100th of a second."
He concluded that some of the Hatto recordings he looked at had been tampered with in an apparent move to evade detection. He found, for example, that one track had been slowed down by more than 15 percent; when the effect was reversed, Rose concluded that the track had originally been published on a recording attributed to pianist Carlo Grante. "We have yet to investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax," he wrote.
Tom Huizenga, a music producer at National Public Radio who also reviews classical music performances for The Washington Post, said "it would be hard to dispute" the findings of the sound engineers in this case.
Different performers play pieces with their own unique rhythms, he said, and different pianos recorded in different environments would also produce different sound waves -- rather than the identical ones found by the engineers in this case.
"Looks like this guy" -- Hatto's husband -- "is busted big time," he said. The editor of Gramophone, James Inverne, said yesterday that he did not have a theory as to how other artists' performances ended up under Hatto's name but that there was no doubt in his mind that the recordings were pilfered. He called the story "sad" and "ironic."
"You may use technology to try and hoodwink people," he said, "but you never know when it's going to come back and bite you."
There are several things in this article of interest to me for various reasons.
There have always been charletons in the music world and in the arts generally. That's a given. What is more interesting is the role critics play in launching/destroying a career as an artist.
American Idol has revealed a dirty little secret. The majority of performers are beyond dreadful, yet, have confidence and support of others. We live in a culture that makes objective reality merely an opinion and pushes self-esteem into self-love without anything to back it up greater than insisting you are great!
Epistemology is a branch of Philosophy which deals with What do we Know and HOW do we know it. There is a plague sweeping our culture that disconnects opinion about art from any reality in an objective sense of co-ordination among the elements such as line, tone, texture, form, color, balance and presentation. The average Joe has no formal Epistemology training and relies on the least of all standards: mere opinion.
The Mystics of the Mind who run our schools and colleges have implanted this idea in idealistic minds and the result has been a plethora of mediocrity everywhere.
How much of what passes for success in Music, Art, Literature, Entertainment and such can pass an objective test?
Let us use SPORTS as an analogy. In SPORTS a player has to produce results to be regarded as great. An objective result backs up the claim to talent and ability. No score:no talent. In non-sports the criterion for greatness devolves down to how much money the art can generate!
Ten thousand applauding morons does not impute talent or achievement; it only creates a popularity contest won by default of culture rot.
But, in music and art there is no education among the masses to instruct the mind of an audience as to what is passable and what is magnificent.
If an uneducated audience screams "BRAVO!" it sickens a society at its very core.
We all have a responsibility to ourselves to become familiar with the consituency of greatness by exposing our mind to a wide variety of critical study before we are able to give an opinion that matters.
What is the dividing line between natural talent and superb transcendance in singing, for example? How does a Mario Lanza measure up to a Luciano Pavoratti? Can a Monet or Chagall be commensurable with a Thomas Kinkaide? How do we learn to see and hear with an informed tool kit of precise thought? How can we analyze what we see and hear so as to think for ourselves?
The common utterance out of the mouth of the great unwashed multitude seems to be: I don't know good art from bad; I only know what I like.
Is this how YOU feel?