Chris Webber replies to me:

>On the Star Wars March:
>
>>Oh, come now.  No technical competence? John Williams knows more about
>>the craft of composing than just about anyone.  I'm convinced *that's*
>>his trouble.
>
>No argument, he does know plenty about the craft of composing for film
>soundtracks.  But if you're feeling strong, do listen to the 'B' section of
>the Star Wars March again (which is what I was specifically talking about)
>and then defend the indefensible if you will.

Well, truth to tell, I can't even listen to the Star Wars music outside
of its movie context.  It's not one of my favorite Williams scores.  But
he has written some that I like quite a lot (not Star Wars, not ET, not
Superman, not Raiders, not the Lucas-Spielberg spectaculars).

>>To paraphrase Eliot: minor composers borrow; major composers steal.
>
>And bad composers paraphrase.
>
>>It ultimately doesn't matter where a composer got his materials.  If it
>>did, surely Handel could be written off as easily as Williams.
>
>Hardly.  Thanks to the hard work of many composers and writers down the
>years, we now live in an age where legal constraints mean that it does
>matter where he got them from.

Well, this implies that Williams out and out appropriates - not borrows,
not builds on, not paraphrases - other composers.  This isn't true.
Otherwise, he'd be sued down to his minimum bank balance.  You're shifting
the ground here.  I hear the litany of all these composers Williams is
supposed to have ripped off, and I must say, except in deliberate Korngold
pastiches and an at times too-eager reach for Holst's Mars and Orff's O
fortuna, I don't hear it myself, any more than I hear Stravinsky's Rite of
Spring in certain works by Bartok, Honegger, Jolivet, and Prokofiev, none
of whom I'd describe as hacks.

>In any case, time and again Handel imaginatively transforms his 'stolen'
>material, much of which was Common Parlance to begin with.  Where is the
>imaginative transformation in the Phantom Menace music, and where the
>Common Parlance?

The music (and the movie) seemed negligible, although I found the music
the best thing in the movie.  I'd much prefer to talk about Williams scores
I like:  Close Encounters, Dracula, the Reivers among them.  I would argue
that Williams always imaginatively transforms his "stolen" material -
"imaginatively," because that's how material gets transformed at all.
The "Common Parlance/Imaginative Transformation" defense of Handel either
applies to everyone else who didn't out-and-out lift wholesale or it's
special pleading.  As you note below, the notion of plagiarism in earlier
times was looser than ours, and not just because of recompense for
intellectual property.  The notion has changed mainly because of legal
definition.  Moral considerations may have prompted authors to fight for
the change, but they wound up getting the short end of the stick anyway.
Now copyright exists primarily for publisher.

>...  My 'carping' concerns the morality in earning vast amounts of money
>through wholesale degradation of other people's imaginative work - Holst's
>"Neptune" and VW's "Sinfonia Antartica", say, in the scoring, harmonies
>and rhythm of the underwater sections of the film.

Well, you've got better ears than I.  I didn't hear either of those guys,
even though I can claim to have heard both works a lot.  "Degradation" of
course is a matter opinion as well as a moral judgment, and I fail to see
how Williams has degraded either work.

>You don't have to be Beckmesser to hold that being dismissive of bad art
>is sometimes a pleasant duty.  I don't listen slate in hand, anyway.

The question is:  Is John Williams bad art? I can accept people not liking
his music, just as I can accept people not liking Mahler's music.  But I
just can't see calling it "bad." It strikes me as at least "capable." As
for "paraphrasing," it happens all the time in works most classical-music
listeners have considered quite fine indeed.  If it hasn't already been
done, someone ought to write a monograph on all the cribs of Stravinsky's
Oedipus Rex among French composers of the Twenties and Thirties.  I mean,
if you want, I can point out Vaughan Williams's paraphrases of Elgar,
particularly since Vaughan Williams pointed them out himself.  Have you
ever read VW on "cribbing?" Delightful and enlightening.

>>What has conscience to do with the enjoyment of music?
>
>Nothing. It does have something to do with composing it.

As we say in the American South, oh foot.  I doubt whether most composers
are particularly moral beings while they are composing.  There's too much
else they have to worry about.

Steve Schwartz