(~4 minutes to read)
I have a concern about something that’s of vital importance to music composers everywhere. It’s this: are we anywhere near running out of unique tunes; riffs; melodies?
This question pops into my mind from time to time when I hear certain songs. George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord, Men at Work’s Down Under, and The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony are three such ditties. What they have in common is that their composers were successfully sued by the copyright owners of substantially similar songs.
There are many, many other examples. And with sampling having been rife in some musical genres for many years now, the rate of unauthorized use must have increased dramatically.
The hearing of themes from one piece in another is not a new phenomenon. In classical music, there are many examples of composers borrowing from each other. I found an example discussed on a musical forum of Mozart having borrowed from Handel, who borrowed from Bach. The same thread called into question the originality of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from his ninth symphony.
Try as I might though, I was unable to find any instances of Bach having borrowed from Mozart…
Nor was I able to find any evidence of lawsuits being filed from one composer to another—perhaps because copyright laws were not in place (and certainly not international) in those days. The word used throughout the material I read was “borrowed”, not “stole” or any of its less harsh synonyms.
A quick search for examples in the jazz genre failed to identify any large body of such cases. Once again, any appearance of a theme from one song in another is a borrowing or a tribute rather than an infringement; imitation is after all the sincerest form of flattery.
No; the genres with the highest incidence of “borrowing” are pop and rock. With relatively simple chord structures and melodies (relative that is to, say, the Brandenburg Concerti) it’s hardly surprising that songs include similar melodies or chord progressions. Heck—some of the music of the late 1950s and early 1960s was so much in the A|D|A|E|A|D|D|A|D|B|E pattern that many songs sounded like many others. Plagiarism? Who would have noticed? Hearing such songs one after the other was not unlike singing limericks, or singing every nursery rhyme you know to the same tune.
As The Four Tops informed us, it’s the same old song…
My very rusty high school math has no advice for me regarding how to even begin calculating the number of permutations of musical note pitch, length, and phrasing there are in a given piece of, say, eight bars’ duration. However, there must be some way of working this out, because it makes sense to me that there must be a theoretical limit.
What About TLAs?
The number of unique three-letter acronyms is very definitely finite. There are precisely 17,576. Which is why one TLA has to mean so many different things. My pseudonymic initials have many meanings, including King David Hotel, Kempen Dressage Horses and, of course, Kelvin D. Hatch.
Having had a career in IT that began in 1973, I’ve been through a lot of TLAs, likely more than 17,576. Which is probably why, when I hear IT-related TLAs, I increasingly frequently misinterpret them completely. For example, PPT used to mean “Processing Program Table” when I was supporting CICS (that’s an FLA—Four Letter Acronym), but now I relate it to Powerpoint files.
And Portmanteaus?
The prevalence of portmanteaus in society these days is nothing short of craptacular. At one point in my awareness of them, they seemed clever and useful, but the number of portmanteaus in circulation these days is ginormous, and very few new ones strike me as clever or useful. I confess to liking “prosumer” because it allows me and my video equipment to stand apart from the consumer community while not claiming membership of the highly-trained professional fraternity, whose cameras cost more than my house.
But like music and TLAs, there must be some mathematical limit to the number or portmanteaus—clever, useful, meaningful or otherwise—that can be constructed.
Thank goodness Shakespeare invented all those new words, and ditto those who’ve done so since. And even portmanteaus themselves count as new words, although I’m not sure that they should be eligible for inclusion in new portmanteaus—that feels too incestuous or recursive or something.
And the Verdict Is…
The TLA situation is definitely a cause for concern. Technicians of all stamps tend to talk in TLAs, and it only takes the mixing of generations or technicians from different disciplines to cause a misinterpretation.
For example, if two people were discussing how to send a package, and one suggested using TNT, the other might not know that TNT is a courier network (Thomas Nationwide Network) and wonder how Trinitrotoluene would possibly help expedite the delivery.
The situation with portmanteaus is not urgent, and to be honest, not important. It will self-regulate.
As for the music industry: it’s probably time that popular music moved on to more complex forms. Either that, or some computer whizz-kid will have to come up with an algorithm that can compare two compositions and yield a CIR. That’s Copyright Infringement Rating, not Calgary Independent Realtors or Cosmetic Ingredient Review or Committed Information Rate or…