iTunes and Gracenote help expose classical plagiarism

She was among the most mysterious figures in classical music: Joyce Hatto, a renowned pianist who retired from active performance in 1976 due to ill health. With the help of her husband and his private recording studio, however, Hatto released scores of recordings in the 1990s, performing the complete solo piano works of many composers including Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Liszt. Some suspected that Hatto might not have produced all her stunning performances herself, but prior to her 2006 death there was no sure confirmation.

It was one of Hatto's recordings of Liszt that Gramophone magazine writer Jed Distler popped into his computer in early February, and iTunes loyally searched the Gracenote database for a match. Found one, too -- but not to a Hatto CD; the disc matched another Liszt recording by pianist László Simon. When Distler pulled that CD from his collection and played it alongside the Hatto disc, they sounded precisely the same.

The ensuing cascade of suspicion, comparison, testing and confirmation is documented thoroughly in the Gramophone and Stereophile articles (and explicated further in the Pristine Audio and CHARM analysis pages), but the summary version: most if not all of Hatto's late recordings are apparently copied from other artists, some modified to hide the theft, some just duplicated as-is. If not for the surprise iTunes ID, this might have gone undetected for much longer. I've often seen iTunes and Gracenote make wildly inaccurate guesses when confronted with rare or custom CDs, but in this case I suppose that wild guess was forensically sound.

Thanks Jonathan!

[via Stereophile]

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Source: http://www.stereophile.com/news/021907hatto/

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She was among the most mysterious figures in classical music: Joyce Hatto, a renowned pianist who retired from active performance in 1976...

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Bryce

Just a minor note (hah): the track look-up doesn't make "guesses" when it displays track info for a CD. It collects the track timings of the CD and then scours its database for a CD with the exact same timings, and then returns the track info for that entry. When it's "wrong" it's because another CD already exists the database with those timings.

February 20 2007 at 5:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Joey

And to think I nearly bought her CDs!

February 20 2007 at 5:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jonathan

Biffo: I agree! I think we classical music lovers tend to get forgotten. It was nice that the free download of the week a while back was something from the Nutcracker, but there should be much more available. It might help people see (or hear) that it's a great genre.

Have you subscribed to the Magnatune free download of the day? Often some great classical tracks via that...

February 20 2007 at 10:06 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Poster

Worse than the (merely) moral wrong of plagiarism, this sounds like the legal wrong of copyright infringement, which can make the infringer liable for damages.

February 20 2007 at 9:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Biffo

What a pleasant surprise to read an article relating to classical music on TUAW. And there was me still getting over the iPod / fruitcake thing.... I think I need a lie down.

February 20 2007 at 5:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael Rose

Wheels -- sure, Gracenote makes mistakes all the time, but in this case it's not a mistake. And on two albums of the same pieces of music, it's highly unlikely for Gracenote to screw up, as the track durations will vary slightly.

February 20 2007 at 12:29 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

wheels

I thought I would never see Stereophile referenced on TUAW.

Is the Gracenote database really that infallible? I know independent testing was done to prove all this, but I have run into instances where Gracenote has given me the wrong album info altogether.

February 19 2007 at 11:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

brady

Does it strike anyone else as odd that the Concert Artists Recordings website is almost entirely blank now?
http://www.concertartistrecordings.com/

February 19 2007 at 11:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mat Lu

I think one of the most amusing things is this quote from Gramophone:

"To love Hatto recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didnâ€™t need the hype of a major labelâ€™s marketing spend to recognise a good, a great, thing when they heard it."

February 19 2007 at 10:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply