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Is John Williams a thief?


phbart

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I've never heard of these reviewers before, but they seem very knowledgeable, which you wouldn't really think considering their 'wacky/weird' editing.  I usually don't care for that type of 'youtube reviewer editing' technique.  Just get to the point.

 

As far as the pieces in question I could careless, and besides....didn't Lucas temp SW to Holst anyways?

 

The Dune Sea ripoff is one that's pretty blatant though.

 

I still don't care though.

 

Good artists borrow, great artists steal blablahblahhhhhh, insert any unoriginal quote on the matter.

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I am also not interested in this thievery discussion. But what interests me is the way how and when quotes from other musical pieces are credited and when not. It seems to be handled quite differently in different cases. 

Sometimes on the CD's you have credits like *contains segments of Prelude No. 5 of ..." sometimes it is not mentioned at all. That confuses me to say the least. There seem to be no rules at all. 

I mean in classical music there is a certain traddition of using themes from other composers and classical music experts would be insulted if they would be patronized by crediting those thing in a cd release. If it is not something like Rachmaninov's "variations on a theme of Pagganini".

And actually most modern film composers hardly following any traddition of classical music writing and not putting any effort in originallity always using the same three unrecongizable same tunes for everything are surely not to be regarded in that discussion.

 

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Would be genuinely interested in a video like this that wasn’t just Star Wars (and briefly Jaws).  That covers such a small amount of his work. It’s always fucking Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars. Find something else to critique, for fuck’s sake. I’m sure there’s plenty of other music in Williams’ oeuvre that borrows. I’d rather hear about that.

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JW does not plagiarize. Plagiarism is an act of intentional deceit, an effort to cut corners and lessen the workload—two things JW can never be accused of. 
 

As others have said, if certain Star Wars motifs or musical contours resemble material written by Holst, it’s because that’s what Lucas was going to use in the first place. As a composer, you’re not going to win the job away from another (dead) composer without being able to deliver the earlier composer’s sound (which happened to already win over the director).

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30 minutes ago, Albus Percival Wulfric said:

Guitar Williams sure is a thief for trying to steal John Williams' identity. His influence has been subtle, but it's there, as witnessed in gullible minds such as these:

 

Sony finally say sorry – Slipped Disc

 

 

 

 

Did you steal this image?

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7 hours ago, Bayesian said:

Plagiarism is an act of intentional deceit, an effort to cut corners and lessen the workload—two things JW can never be accused of. 

 

That's a rather misleading personal definition. Wiki says: Plagiarism is the representation of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. Composers like Williams and Horner (and many others, both just are famous Hollywood examples) can be accused of hiding their sources by just not mentioning them - which would of course be rather impractical. As for the works of art, there is no rigorous and precise distinction between practices like imitation, stylistic plagiarism, copy, replica and forgery. 

 

But seeing the recent Horner quote in the LBT thread, it's certainly a matter that needs to be discussed in context of musical history and can't be just brushed off as 'untrue per se'.

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