Musical performance plagiary - Hatto

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

iTunes fingers musical fraud

February 20, 2007

NewScientist Blog

Some people have the weirdest desire to be remembered for what they are not. Here is a perfect example of a pure second-hander Rand-style: Joyce Hatto. (Hat tip to the Lew Rockwell e-mail notice I receive.)

Joyce Hatto - Musical Fraud

Below is a quote from the article linked in the title at the top of this post. There is also an ongoing Investigation by Pristine Classical called Hatto Hoax that is giving full documentation.

Last week, a critic at the Gramophone magazine got surprise when he put a Hatto recording of Lizt's 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer. The iTunes player identified the disc as being recorded by another pianist, Lászlo Simon. He dug out the Simon album and found it sounded exactly the same as the Hatto one.

iTunes had stumbled on a hoax. To identify albums it calculates a 'discid' from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online. The Gramophone critic tried another disc - Hatto playing Rachmaninov - and again iTunes identified it as belonging to someone else. Again, the named recording - by Yefim Bronfman - sounded no different.

I knew a guy like this once in Brazil (Mario A. M. Ramos). He would have people compose works (I knew of at least one), then he would learn them on the piano, then he would show them off to his political friends by playing them. They sounded a little like Rand's tiddlywink music. But he would adamantly claim that he could not read a note of music and that the only explanation for his capacity was that he was a musical genius. He once hired me to write out a composition and orchestrate it, which I did—and I even conducted that crap. I already deducted that his not reading music was a bill of goods, but I did not know at the time that he was not the real composer.

I also know of one other Brazilian pianist who is famous (I prefer not to give his name until proof is one day established) who did like Hatto. I think it will be more difficult to prove, however, because he had actual people play for him instead of digitally altering recordings on the market.

I normally am not into denunciations, but this level of hoax and fraud gets under my skin. These people are everything I despise in life with respect to productive activity. I don't even think they rob any fame or recognition from the ones they pilfer. They simply sell something to the world that does not exist: themselves as experts. They are beyond parasites. They are literally nothing.

The best way to combat plagiary is through education. But when it reaches this level, full denunciation and condemnation is in order. These people are not merely misguided. They are disgusting.

Michael

[reason.on]

iTunes fingers musical fraud

Interesting. You know there are significant differences in the wavforms (1 & 2)...and I'd except if the recording were stolen that they would be identical, which makes me think that the whole thing could be mistake.

Btw, Rand herself has been accused of doing the same with Atlas Shrugged...(I don't buy into Raimondo's ravings on much of anything, but I did find the similarities between Rand and Garrett's work interesting).

http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050315-16.htm

RCR

Edited February 22, 2007 by R. Christian Ross

[Dragonfly]

Interesting. You know there are significant differences in the wavforms (1 & 2)...and I'd except if the recording were stolen that they would be identical, which makes me think that the whole thing could be mistake.

No, both recordings come without any doubt from the same source. The differences in the waveforms are extremely small (compare with the waveforms of the other pianists for example) and can be easily explained by errors generated in processing the data. Any analog step (like a tape recording) would introduce deviations, or a compression algorithm for digital data. And when you listen to the recordings there isn't any doubt that these come from one and the same recording. Even the same pianist wouldn't be able to reproduce his own recording that accurately, let alone another one (in a devilishy difficult piece).

Besides, I looked at one of the other cases where they use the color triangles, there the evidence is also completely damning, removing any doubts about the plagiarism by this person.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is a very good article I came across on Hatto on an amazing website called Edge: The Third Culture.

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER

By Denis Dutton

Posted on Edge March 20, 2007

(First published as an OpEd piece in The New York Times, February 26, 2007.)

From the article:

Yet the Joyce Hatto episode is a stern reminder of the importance of framing and background in criticism. Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality. Otherwise, we might as well feed Chopin scores into a computer.

This makes instrumental criticism a tricky business. I’m personally convinced that there is an authentic, objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein. This special quality of his is actually in the music, and is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man’s face. But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response.

I have the impression that this whole Hatto episode is just the tip of the iceberg of something very unsettling in our remote-control culture. I get a really creepy feeling from it.

Michael