In a waspish lecture entitled The Hero as Man of Letters, the Victorian essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle sought to debunk the fashionable notion of the solitary Romantic genius. This idea, he suggested in 1840, was a contemporary fantasy: “Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavouring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books.” It didn’t work. Despite Carlyle’s best efforts, the alluring notion of pure, unmediated self-expression in the arts never really went away. As a consequence, from the Romantic era onwards, the moral implications of plagiarism began to become a seriously hot issue. If the best art was a unique emanation from the depth of an individual’s soul, it was an outrage of the highest order to nick it and put it in your own stuff.
Which brings us to Led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven, their classic track from 1971. This week, in the latest twist in a long-running saga, a San Francisco appeals court reinstated a verdict that the venerated English rock band did not steal a guitar riff in the song from Spirit, a California band of the same era. Michael Skidmore, a trustee for a late member of Spirit, had won an initial appeal, after claiming that the famous descending chord progression that opens Stairway was lifted from Spirit’s song Taurus, released in 1968.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TGK3St
Editorial The famous guitar sequence at the start of Stairway to Heaven was not a case of musical plagiarism
In a waspish lecture entitled The Hero as Man of Letters, the Victorian essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle sought to debunk the fashionable notion of the solitary Romantic genius. This idea, he suggested in 1840, was a contemporary fantasy: “Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavouring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books.” It didn’t work. Despite Carlyle’s best efforts, the alluring notion of pure, unmediated self-expression in the arts never really went away. As a consequence, from the Romantic era onwards, the moral implications of plagiarism began to become a seriously hot issue. If the best art was a unique emanation from the depth of an individual’s soul, it was an outrage of the highest order to nick it and put it in your own stuff.
Which brings us to Led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven, their classic track from 1971. This week, in the latest twist in a long-running saga, a San Francisco appeals court reinstated a verdict that the venerated English rock band did not steal a guitar riff in the song from Spirit, a California band of the same era. Michael Skidmore, a trustee for a late member of Spirit, had won an initial appeal, after claiming that the famous descending chord progression that opens Stairway was lifted from Spirit’s song Taurus, released in 1968.
Continue reading... https://ift.tt/eA8V8J March 10, 2020 at 08:27PM
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