Music authorship controversies often take light in today’s news, but we don’t often think of them outside the context of pop culture. All artists from Mozart to Stevie Wonder have had to worry about someone taking their music and passing it off as their own or using it in someway to earn revenue for themselves. To this day we still struggle to find ways to ensure that a musician's work is not stolen from them in anyway. In this modern day it is easy to think that downloading music online is not harming the musician, while in reality music authorship fraud has never been a larger problem than it is today.
Perhaps one of the oldest and most famous legends of music authorship fraud is when Mozart got a request from a “Mysterious Stranger” to write a Requiem. Mozart, being down on his luck at the time, gladly accepted the request with no questions asked. As we know now, the mysterious stranger turned out to be Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach who already had a reputation of presenting other people's music as his own. The count intended to use this Requiem to commemorate his late wife, but of course he never got a chance to go through with his plan. This case is very different than most modern cases for many obvious reasons, but it has many unseen similarities as well. The Count intended to use Mozart's music for his own fame and profit, as many people do today by taking music from the internet and using it for their own profit without the permission of the original artist. The Requiem has such a rich history and this small authorship debacle is only the surface!
Unfortunately in our modern age, where everything is available to us at all times, it is easy to be exposed to something later pass it off as your own. Often times this is done out of ignorance but sometimes people find themselves in the face of lawsuits: especially musicians. We decided to explore a few modern examples of authorship controversy; perhaps this is where the Count would have found himself had he actually taken credit for Mozart’s Reqiuem.
In many cases, to avoid serious penalty, an artist accused of using previously written material ends up co-crediting the songwriting to the artist that did it first. This happened to the band Oasis in the late 90’s when they were about to release the song “Step Out”; upon further review, it was brought up that the tune had an uncanny resemblance to the Stevie Wonder hit “Uptight”. The band cut the song from their album and released it later, rightfully crediting Wonder.
Listen to the similarity between the main tune of “Uptight” and the chorus of “Step out”. Even the keys each respective song takes on bear similarity.
Stevie Wonder, Uptight
Oasis, Step Out
It seems that well known bands are accused of stealing more often than we think. Michael Roffman at consequenceofsound.net has another example. Music listeners of 2008 surely know Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida”, but not many know that Joe Satriani accused the band of reworking his song “If I Could Fly” into their pop hit. If that was not enough, someone later claimed the song bore resemblance to Cat Steven’s song “Foreigner Suite”.
The artists, luckily, overcame their differences and settled without much controversy. On a humorous note, someone has pointed out that both the Coldplay and Satrani song can be compared to an 18th century Pergolesi song “Se tu m'ami“. We cannot actually discern exactly where this claim comes from, but we invite you to listen for yourself and come to your own conclusions. (Not all claims turn out to be true, after all!)
To bring another twist to the story, there is actually much debate as to whether Pergolesi wrote “Se tu m’ami”. Composer Alessandro Parisotti attributed Pergolesi to it but there is little evidence that Parisotti didn’t just write the piece himself.
Coldplay
Satriani
Pergolesi/Parisotti
As we can see, music authorship fraud has been a problem society has faced for ages. Through the years we have gotten much better about confirming the authenticity of an author's music before accepting it as theirs, however, the problem is not even close to being over. With the new age of technology musicians face and entire new world of problems with music authorship and illegal downloading and use of their work. Though we have given less extreme examples (both of which were solved without issue), this topic should not be taken lightly because it has impacted many careers in the past and will continue to do so until we take the initiative to stop it.
Mozart writing: Brian
Current examples and writing: Hannah
Current examples and writing: Hannah
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