On the fiddle
A Japanese composer admits passing off another composer's work as his own. What's the problem?Shocking news from the world of Japanese classical music this week (what do you mean “what’s this got to do with us?” – wait and see), as it emerged an award-winning composer has spent the past 20 years receiving plaudits, gongs and riches, while getting somebody else to write his music.
Mamoru Samuragochi, who is known as ‘Japan’s Beethoven’ because he is deaf (although I wager he’ll henceforth be known as ‘Japan’s Milli Vanilli’), first came to fame in the mid-1990s.
But Samuragochi has admitted he hasn’t composed his own music since 1996. However, given 1996 is itself very much in the mid-1990s, it does raise the question of when he did actually write anything of his own.
Samuragochi confessed to paying an unknown composer to write music on his behalf, and was quoted as saying “I started hiring the person to compose music for me, when I was asked to make movie music for the first time.
“I had to ask the person to help me for more than half the work because the ear condition got worse.”
At no point did Samuragochi explain why he failed to credit his co-creator.
Before his website went offline in light of the scandal, it claimed Samuragochi learned to play the piano when he was four and was playing Beethoven and Bach by the age of 10. But given this week’s news I’d take those claims with a pinch of salt if I were you. He’s probably not even deaf either.
But what’s the big deal here anyway? It’s hardly the first time somebody has got rich and famous off the labours of others. Industry has been built on this basic principle for as long as I can remember. And frankly, I’m glad that’s the case.
Instead of treating Samuragochi as a wool-pulling shyster who has duped his fans and the wider music world for two decades, why can’t we see him as a savvy operator, giving the public what they need by using the resources around him (and paying for it, of course) to deliver a decent product at the end of the process?
If he hadn’t made his confession this week, nobody would have really cared how this came about. The music industry is an industry like all others. You shouldn’t question the production process any more than you’d question the process behind your chicken nuggets. And believe me, you really don’t want to know any more about that.
I say, more power to him. He should have kept his mouth shut and carried on. Unfortunately for him, honesty has got in the way of some fairly sound business principles. And he’s now probably got the musician’s union to answer to, God help him.
So, if anybody else is reading this and the story feels a bit familiar, maybe you’d like to keep quiet.
Anyway – let’s not forget, Elvis didn’t write his own material; nor did Frank Sinatra. Okay, the same can be said for Westlife, but you can’t have everything.
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