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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's BĂȘte Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Tuesday, February 20, 2007



The classical music world is abuzz with the news that pianist Joyce Hatto plagiarized other pianists' recordings and released them as her own.

"The Milli Vanilli of classical music," I thought, but then realized, that no, Hatto was worse. Milli Vanilli merely lip-synched to records that singers had been paid to sing; Hatto apparently stole other people's records and released them as her own.

And then I thought that maybe John Oswald should rename his Plunderphonics, "Hattophonics." But no, that's wrong too; Oswald is upfront about his sampling. (I love the piece he did using hundreds of live Grateful Dead recordings -- with their permission -- Grayfolded.)

There really is no precedent for this.

And then I thought, I'll post something about Joyce Hatto's forays into pop music, and her surprisingly husky, yet sweet, contralto voice, on this tender song I happen to have a copy of, which she called, "All My Troubles"; and I was going to post an MP3 of "Yesterday" by the Beatles, with its wonderfully apropos lyrics --

All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're hear to stay
Oh I believe in yesterday --


but I decided against it, because music-hosting services frown upon unlicensed publishing, even for a joke, and the Beatles Inc can be real hard-ass about things (ask me some time about the time I tried to get permission via a college friend who was then friends with Lisa Marie Presley who was then married to Michael Jackson who owned the Beatles' publishing for permission to use samples from a Beatles record for a charity album -- Neil Young and the Byrds and the Mills Brothers and Spike Jones and Ornette Coleman all said yes, but Elvis and the Beatles feared for their empires) -- so, anyway, in lieu of such an MP3 post, here is my excuse.

Paul's voice would sound sexy coming from a woman's body, don't you think?

You know some sampling collective is going to use the name the Joyce Hatto Experience some day soon . . .


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