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A Mystery about "Authors" of Classical Music

RC Noriyuki Shiga

In late February, it was reported that the face of "the father of modern music" Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) had been reconstructed based on his bones using the CG technology. When we look at the 18th-century music history like J.S. Bach, we will sometimes find mysterious relations between composers and their works. That is, we found many strange cases where the arrangements of other person's works were told to be the works of the arrangers. For example, Bach's "Concerto for 4 Harpsichords in A minor BWV1065" is an arrangement of Vivaldi's concerto. The piece which is known as Mozart's "Symphony No.37 in G Major, K.444" was proved to be composed by Michael Haydn. Mozart only composed the introduction of the symphony. How should we understand such mysterious relations between arrangers and composers, which seem very strange in terms of present viewpoints?

If we understand that the first modern copyright law in German was the Prussian law of 1837, it is assumed that they had no idea of the right to indicate name or the right of adaptation, or they had different ideas about those issues because they had existed long before the Prussian law. However, given the fact that so many masterpieces by them have been handed down to the present day, they must have some consciousness of their own works at least.

According to the experimental study "the early history of musical copyright" by H. Pohlmann, in the flourishing age of polyphonic music since the 15th century, there was a time when composing parodies with respect was necessary to the music composition. Even in such circumstances, Heinrich Sch?tz(1585-1672), who was the musician in the early German Baroque, insisted the name of the author of the original piece must be indicated when composers use a part of others' works for their musical composition. In fact, he did so at the beginning part of his works. At such an early stage, there also existed abundance of examples showing awareness of copyright/moral right, which could be applicable to the present day. But it was not until the late 18 century, that is, after the death of J.S. Bach that such awareness was widely shared. At that time, with the development and changes of composing technologies, the awareness of originality had been overly stressed and even harmonic progression was accused of plagiarism. Considering these, the true intention of BWV 1065 arrangement seemed to purely show respect in a traditional manner in those days to Vivaldi who strongly influenced Bach's music.

However, in many cases, the confusion of the composer's name was not caused by the composers' awareness to their works. For example, a piece by other composer in the folder for educating children in Bach's family was published with Bach's name after his death. Then the piece was widely believed to be Bach's work. "Menuet. BWV Anh. 114" is also frequently used for mobile phone ring tone and has become familiar as Bach's work for years. Recently the piece was found to be by Petzold who was a composer of Bach's age. From today's point of view, the relations between authors and their works seem tangled. It seems that it takes an enormous effort to figure out the real picture of the relations as much as it took for reconstructing the image in life from the bones.

(*) Hansjörg Pohlmann, Die Frühgeschichte des musikalischen Urheberrechts (ca.1400-1800), Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel, 1962, S.59 ff.