I've heard some bitchy arguments lately about songs that have been "stolen" from other songs, usually from someone who wants to claim moral superiority over the song thief. One I've head a couple of times recently revolves around how John Lennon wrote "Norwegian Wood" after hearing Bob Dylan's "Fourth Time Around." (One of the rare times Bob doesn't get called the thief.)
There’s an axiom that says there is no such thing as “original” music.
After what we could consider to be the first sound, from a spiritual
perspective — “om” to some, “amen” to others — it’s all the same.
Musicians borrow different parts and make them their own, but there’s
nothing really new, nothing that hasn’t been done before. Claude Debussy
and Johann Sebastian Bach may sound different, but what they did was
all there already, in a sense.
At the end of an engaging profile by Alex Ross, centered around his recent live-streamed performances from his home, the pianist Igor Levitt says this
“When I started doing these house concerts, I realized
that every single problem I had ever had with the performing world
suddenly disappeared. I never really cared about acoustics. I never
cared that much about the quality of the piano. All I wanted to do was
play. The important point about these concerts is not how they sound but
the fact that they happened. Everything is getting reduced to the
essential thing of being there and playing.”
Ross' essay shows that this attitude applies not just to Levitt's recent lockdown performances to the pianists entire career, his choice of repertoire, and his outlook on life.
The truest musical experiences involve performers and audiences engaging with the music as it is presented to them. It's not about the acoustics, or the quality of the piano. The setting and the medium don't really matter. Even compromised or distorted media can create a meaningful musical expression.
Yesterday toward the end of a long day of internet surfing, I came across a group called Band Geek playing a note-for-note recreation of Close to the Edge, the eighteen-or-so minute piece that takes up side one of Yes' 1972 album of the same name. It's kind of a ridiculous piece of music. It's majestic and pretentious and grandiose. The idea that a rock band would supersede its proscribed function and produce a quasi-symphonic monstrosity generated the band and its music both praise and derision since its creation. I, for one, love it. If one wants to play it, one cannot make a trip to the music store to pick up the score as you would to pick up a volume of Beethoven's sonatas. One must transcribe it from the recording and find a bunch of similarly-minded colleagues to pull it off. It's by necessity a labor of love, with the reward of not an arena of adoring fans, like Yes had, but making a video in you basement which gets a surprising (to me, at least) amount of views on YouTube.
What's the point, you may ask. The point is that it happens. They played it and recorded it, and at some later point in time I watched it. At the end, the bass player says "I'm so happy." I was happy, too, and I was happy for him.
