December 28, 2024 • 24 mins
Joe Bennett, Berklee College of Music Professor and musicologist talks about song copyrights, Led Zeppelin, the progression of musical influences and what constitutes a classic Christmas song.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is What's at Risk with Mike Christian on wb Z,
Boston's news radio. Hi, Mike Christian, here of What's at Risk.
First up on tonight's show, we have an Encore Holiday
special with Joe Bennett, Berkeley College of Music professor and
noted musicologist. Joe talks about song copyrights, Led Zeppelin, the
(00:25):
progression of musical influences, and what constitutes a classic Christmas song.
And in our second segment, we have a special guest,
Omo Moses, educator, CEO and founder of math Talk and
the author of a new book out in January twenty
twenty five called The White Peril. Omo is a son
(00:47):
of legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses, and the book
is a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming black in America
that interviews voices from three generations of the Moses fans.
Joe Bennett is a musicologist, writer, and researchers specializing in
(01:09):
the analysis of popular music and songwriting. As a professor
at Berkeley in the Professional Music and Liberal Arts departments,
he teaches classes relating to artists, development, music copyright, and
song analysis. His academic research focuses on the creative practice
and psychology of songwriters. As an expert witness forensic musicologist,
(01:33):
he advises music lawyers, publishers, artists, and songwriters on matters
of plagiarism and musical similarity. Well, hello everyone, I'm glad
to have you here. We're here with Joe Bennett, who's
a professor at Berkeley College of Music. Maybe Joe, the
best thing to do would be to start with you
talking a little bit about your background if you don't mind.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Well, sure, as you said, I'm a professor at Berkeley,
as you can probably tell from the exit, and I'm
not American born, so I'm one of these immigrants that
he hears so much about. I'm trained in the UK
originally as a musician and as a musicologist. When I'm
not teaching undergraduates at Berkeley. My specialism is sort of
(02:17):
song copyright, so that's my main interest as a forensic musicologist.
So what I do is I help students and copyright
lawyers and artists and publishers to figure out whether one
song has been copied from another. And so that's the
sort of commercial end of what I do. But the
academic end of what I do is I just love
(02:39):
analyzing pop music to figure out how it's built.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, that's fascinating. So tell me a little bit more
about forensic musicology. I've never actually heard that term before,
although I can infer what it means. What does that
entail as far as your process?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Sure, Well, it's sort of adjacent to the law profession, really,
and a lot of my commercial clients are in fact
copyright lawyers specialists in intellectual property. And so this usual
scenario unfolds like this. A songwriter A says, hey, songwriter B,
you just had a big hit, and your chorus or
(03:17):
your top line melody or your bass drift sounds a
little bit like mine, or you sampled my drum intro,
that sort of thing, And they talk to a copyright
lawyer who says, well, we need to be sure that
that statement is true. Anyone can accuse anyone of anything.
Let's call an expert musicologist who can do the technical
(03:38):
analysis of the songs and figure out the extent of
similarity and therefore the likelihood that song B is partly
copied from song A. So I help people to resolve
those disputes truthfully and ethically, I hope, with the goal
of everyone getting their fair share of royalties in the life.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
There's a quote from you, and I'll just do it
for our listeners. I take the view that music exists
as a vibrant, living art form in contemporary society and
evolves constantly through new technologies, distribution channels, and cultural dynamics.
I love that. I love that quote, But what what
does that all mean in terms of proving that somebody
(04:21):
stole a core progression or you know, the essence of
a lyrical progression or something. Because I do recognize and
acknowledge that music is progressive, right, and everybody's always building
on what the past was, and there's got to be
some sort of some form of emulation and copying. How
do you what's the difference between that process that happens,
(04:43):
the folk process they used to call it, or just
stealing and lifting a song.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, it's a great question, and really the the which
side of the divide any given case falls is very
much what I'm asked to write about and analyze and opine. Yeah,
as you, I've forgotten about that quote, can't even where
I said.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It or somebody. Yeah, Bob Dylan was a famous theef
of old songs, traditional songs, lyrics, you name it everywhere.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
So that's sort of long and academic quote you just
quoted for me. That that's I guess what I'm representing
there is sort of cultural Darwinism, the idea that the
arts in our society, and music in this case in point,
it functions like a Darwinist ecosystem. So you have endless
variation and mutation, and of course you have heredity. So
(05:38):
as you say, music can't really exist without prior music.
And you know, there's no composer or songwriter alive who's
never heard another song, so everyone's influenced by everything that
went before. And I think romantically speaking, that's that's a
rather beautiful thing. And yet how do songwriters get paid. Well,
they get paid through royalty when the song is played
(06:01):
on the radio or played at a show, or played
on a podcast, and that means that it's their property,
and obviously they have a right to protect that property.
So copyright law is essentially about trying to find that balance.
I describe myself always as an ethical forensic musicologist. That is,
(06:22):
you know, when people hire me, I don't just say
what the client wants me to say. If, for example,
I have a plaintiff client that calls me and says,
you know, justin Bieber stole my melody, I will say, well,
you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Let's look at
really how plausible that assertion is, starting with a melodic comparison.
(06:47):
But as you say, there is no sort of concept
of entirely original music devoid of influence from the past.
So we have in all music what we might refer
to as commonplace elements. And that's certainly the language I
use in my reports. So if we take a genre randomly,
(07:08):
like let's say EDM or disco, disco is something everyone's
familiar with. So in disco music, one of the ubiquitous
elements of disco is a four on the floor kick
drum boom boom, boom boom. So nobody owns the copyrights
on the four on the floor kick drum. You can't
sue someone by saying your kick drum is four on
(07:30):
the floor and so is mine, therefore you infringed my copyright.
That would be a ridiculous world, because everyone likes to
dance to a floor for on the floor kick drum.
So a whole lot of my job, and I love
my job is just listening to a ton of music,
you know, to figure out what's unique about a track
and what are the more generic elements from a which
(07:51):
because we get the word genre.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I mean, I ask you about a specific case that
I'm gonna guess you're you're probably familiar with, has to
do with leads Eppelin and Stairway to Heaven. I think
it was pretty well known litigation. Do you recall that
one Joe.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I Skidmore versus led Zeppelin went through the through the
courts in California for many years.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah. It was initially started with a band that I
used to quite like out in California called Spirit, led
by a guy named Randy California. And I believe they
had a song called Taurus, which I can almost remember
hearing them play live, and they apparently had opened for
led Zeppelin. This is many many years ago, probably in
the sixties, right late sixties. And then the allegation was
(08:34):
that Jimmy Page had lifted part of Stairway to Heaven
from the Spirit song called Taurus. But can you maybe
give some more illumination and enlightenment about that particular case,
just to give everybody an example which everybody would know
led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven, of course, sure happy
to do so.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So that particular, there are a lot of kind of
rather technical legal aspects to it of what was protectable
by copyright and who filed the copyright registration and when,
so putting all that sort of legalize stuff to one
side and just talking about the music. The song you
mentioned was Tourist by Spirit, and what it shares with
(09:21):
Stairway to Heaven is that it uses what in music
theory terms is referred to as a chromatic minor key
descending baseline. So the baseline, obviously nor music's the lowest
thing we hear, and chromatic just means here on the
guitar means going up or down one threat at a time,
so it's, you know, the nearest available note. So famously,
(09:44):
Stairway to Heaven goes like this and it has that
descending baseline, whereas Taurus, which was actually created before a
(10:10):
couple of years before, say in a Heaven, And that's
key obviously to the case, because the who made it
first is the first thing you have to establish. Taurus
goes like this, So obviously they have some similarities. They
(10:36):
both happen to be played starting at the seventh threat
on the D string of the guitar, and they're both
in the key of a minor, and they're both sort
of seventy something beats per minute, which is sort of
you know, classic rock ballad tempo. So they have those
sort of surface similarities, and really, in a copyright playing
(10:57):
things like that don't matter so much because obviously you
can play any song in any key and on any
instruments and at any tempo and it's still the same song.
But the case was obviously about that similarity that when
you play them back to back they do sound pretty similar.
Now spoiler coming up. Led Zeppelin won the case and
(11:20):
Randy California's Airs did not, in fact have a claim
to the copyright on Stairway to Heaven, which obviously wouldn't
be the financially very lucrative copyright to own and the
Stairway to Heaven parties. The Led Zeppelin parties in the
case argued that this chromatic minor key descending phrase what
at Berkeley we would call a line cliche, because it's
(11:43):
so common that lots of composers use it. They argued
that it is in other things, so, for example, my
Phonny Valentine, Sweet Comic Valentine. I think they also mentioned
Jim Jimy Jim Jimmy Jim Jim. There's a whole ton
(12:03):
of songs that use that minor key, far descending bassline,
and I think they went back to the seventeenth century
and found some, you know, some baroque music that did
a similar thing. So that's the classic way that you
demonstrate in a copyright infringement case, at least one based
on melody that plaintiff does not have a case because
(12:25):
it's a commonplace element.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Well, thank you very much. That was exemplified in a
much more convincing manner than most people make their points
on the show. So thank you, Joe.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I'm just an old guitar player who loves to play
led Zeppelin riffs.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Oh thank you, silver Bell. It's Christmas time. Let's move
away from all this technical litigation stuff and get into
the spirit of the season. Joe, and you were the
spirit of the season.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I see what you did there.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
So you were approached by a UK chain of sharping
malls several years ago, I believe, who wanted to commission
a Christmas song to make their shoppers feel happy for
the holiday season. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, it was a whole lot of fun that was. Yeah,
it was it was a commercial project that they there
was this chain of UK mals I guess we call
them in America that and they wanted to commission some
UK songwriters to write the happiest Christmas song possible. And
(13:38):
you know a lot of the time when clients come
up with stuff like that, I said, well, really, you
can't measure music in that way. It's it's an emotional
art form. Who can say whether one thing is happier
than another. But I kind of got where they were
coming from, and so what they wanted from me was
actually some sort of cultural research that would enable them
(13:58):
to brief the songwriters about what kind of song they
wanted to play in these models. So I said, okay, well,
challenge accepted. I'll look at the corpus. That's what any
musicologists would do if you're investing any genre or a style,
you look at the corpus work. So my methodology was
to take for that year, which was was a while
(14:21):
back now, twenty sixteen, the top two hundred Spotify streaming
songs in Christmas Week and subtract all the songs that
were not very Christmasy that left us with a total
of seventy eight songs, and then analyze the actual characteristics
(14:41):
of those seventy eight songs to see what they had
in common, what was interesting about them when they were released,
And we got quite a lot out of the process.
We analyzed music and lyric and I think it was
perhaps the lyric analysis that was the most interesting outcome
from it.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah, that's interesting. So did you actually come up with
a song or Yeah, we actually wrote a new song
based on all these favorable elements from all the old songs.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah. It was a sort of a fun bop in
a I guess fairly derivative of the classic Phil spect
album Christmas Gift for You. So I had a lot
of that sixties you know, sleigh bells and tubular bells,
and that album is obviously so influential on Christmas music
more generally, particularly in America. So the song came out great,
(15:35):
and they sang it in the chain of shopping malls
and everyone seemed happy with the project. And there's a
lot of smiling faces all around.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
So what's the secret formula behind a quintessential Christmas song.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Well, I don't know about secret formula, but certainly we
all know that Christmas songs have certain shared characteristics. So
looking at the yes, the findings of that little research
project that we did looking at repertoire, the most interesting
one was lyric theme. Whenever we do song analyses, and
(16:07):
I do this with my students at Berkeley all the time,
one of the questions I asked the class is you
know what's the song about. What's the core message, the cause,
simple idea behind this song. And it's an exercise that
any of us can do if we think of our
top ten favorite songs and read off the lyric. Normally,
the actual core message of the song is very very simple,
(16:27):
even if the way it is expressed in lyrics can
be very you know, artistic, very oblique, very metaphorical whatever.
In Christmas songs. In a word, the most common theme
in all Christmas music is the word home, the idea
of coming home Christmas or for the holidays or work,
you know, whatever one celebrates at this time of year,
(16:47):
because it's something a lot of people do. You know,
you go back to the family seat, and you go
back off into the place you grew up. Young people
will go back maybe and spend time with their parents
when they've been away but college or out there living
their lives. So it makes the holiday period a time
(17:09):
of sort of homecoming and nostalgia, we might say. And
sure enough, a lot of Christmas music or holiday music
lyrics deal with themes of homecoming and nostalgia. And in fact,
if you think of perhaps the best known and one
(17:29):
of the oldest among the Christmas hits rotation that we
still hear today, that would be Bing Crosby's White Christmas,
originally nineteen forty two. I think even that itself is
a nostalgic Christmas song. You know, the opening lyric, I'm
dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I
(17:51):
used to know, So it immediately evokes nostalgia right there
in the first line.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Oh for sure. And I still love that song. I
love the way I thinks a deep.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Points, isn't it. You know what other records from nineteen
forty two still get into regular Spotify rotation today.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Well, music
in general makes us nostalgic, right, I mean, those songs
that remind us of different times. Christmas is the great.
The greatest example happens every year, and as kids were
always trying to think back to those wonderful times of
our childhood, and so certainly the songs would strike us.
But don't you think songs in general strike some chord
(18:32):
with us of their lyric intensive type songs.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Well completely, because popular music means different things to us
at different times in our lives, at different times in
our own social development. There's an expression I like to overuse,
which is the best pop music in the world all
came out in a single year, and that year was
the year you were seventeen. And I think if we
(18:57):
all think back to when we were seventeen, there was
great records that year. I was born in the very
late sixties, so for me, the year I was seventeen
would have been nineteen eighty seven, So a lot of
big hair rock, you know, you two climbing high in
the charts. Just a whole lot of sort of mid
eighties synth pop was around, and you know, I still
(19:18):
love that stuff to this day. But so the answer
to that question will be different for everyone, depending on
what age they are. But that is of course power
of popular music, because when we hear those tracks from
our youth. To some extent, we get thrown back to
in our minds, to where we were and what we
were doing at that time in our lives.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yeah, for sure. Sadly, my memory would go back to
around the time you were born, which was the late sixties,
around the time I was seventeen.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
So well, that's.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Year for music, though you can Oh, goodness.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
You're so not wrong. Yeah, wasn't that a wonderful time?
And I think maybe at Berkeley we rather romanticize that
time because it's it was a period when basically a
great record was great musicians playing in the studio. That
is to say, you know, live players were recorded on tracks.
Because we have so many great instrumentalists and singers at
(20:16):
Berkeley a lot of the time, a lot of my
students really love that period in music, you know, classic
rock era, when a lot of great records were made
just by musicians being in a room together.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Right, and what are you know? I'll apply this to
holiday songs, but I think it applies to songs in general.
The roots of some of these songs go way back
in time, you know, traditional music, traditional music songs that
maybe go back to the Renaissance, or you know, the
Middle Ages. What are your thoughts about that? Do we
(20:50):
do we bring forward some of those chords and songs
and tunes that are now incorporated into the music that
we listen to today.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, it's a great question. Essentially, popular music is it's
quite a harmonically simplified art form. And I say that
as a musicologist who studies and indeed loves popular music.
That is, we like simple repeating hooks. We like our
chorus is to be memorable. We don't like, for example,
to have a whole lot of key changes in our
(21:19):
popular music. So if you compare melodic content of popular
music with melodic content of, for one of a better term,
classical music of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, you'll
find there's a difference in melodic complexity. And that's not
because hop music is banal or classical music is elitist
(21:43):
or anything like that. It's just that they serve different functions.
They serve different functions for their audiences. So if the
history of popular music, at least in what some musicologists
call the common practice era sort of you know, Renaissance
pero through to the early twentieth century, it's a history
(22:03):
of ever increasing harmonic and melodic complexity.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
I'll ask you one last song, Joe, staying in line
with the theme of today's so show, the holiday theme,
what's your favorite holiday song?
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Well, here's the I'm not a believer, I'm not a
religious person, but it's hard to disagree with wanting to
have peace on earth and families coming together and people
being nice to each other at this time of the year.
So I'm going to have two if i may. I'm
(22:40):
very fond of Tim Mentionin's the song White Wine in
the Sun, which is about bringing and he's Australian, so
of course at that time of year in December, it's
very hot over there, and it's the story of bringing
his baby daughter home to meet his family and all
the reflections that triggers in him in very emotional lyric
(23:02):
But in terms of songs that we still hear today
and what you might call the Christmas rotation, I'm very
fond of a song that came out the year after
White Christmas, called I'll Be Home for Christmas and so
it came out in nineteen forty three, written by Kim
Gannon and Walter Kent, and the whole song is eight
(23:23):
lines and goes like this, I'll be home for Christmas.
You can plan on me. Please have snow and missiletoe
and present by the tree. Christmas Eve will find me
where the love light gleams. I'll be home for Christmas,
if only in my dreams. And it's an epistolary lyric. Obviously,
(23:44):
nineteen forty three a lot of American gis were overseas
in Europe. It was the time of World War Two.
So the idea is he's writing home, this character saying
I'll be home for Christmas, and you know, even if
he won't, even if it's only in his dreams, the
spirit of homecoming and missing those you love is right
(24:05):
there in the lyric. And the fact that it's set
to such an exquisite melody, I think just has really
helped you to stand the test of time.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Thank you, Joe. I can't think of a better way
to end a holiday themed discussion than that one. We've
been talking with Joe Bennett from Berkeley College of Music.
Thank you so much. Joe really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Thank you Mike for having me. It's been great to be.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
A must. We'll be right back after the news at
the bottom of the hour
This is What's at Risk with Mike Christian on wb Z,
Boston's news radio. Hi, Mike Christian, here of What's at Risk.
First up on tonight's show, we have an Encore Holiday
special with Joe Bennett, Berkeley College of Music professor and
noted musicologist. Joe talks about song copyrights, Led Zeppelin, the
(00:25):
progression of musical influences, and what constitutes a classic Christmas song.
And in our second segment, we have a special guest,
Omo Moses, educator, CEO and founder of math Talk and
the author of a new book out in January twenty
twenty five called The White Peril. Omo is a son
(00:47):
of legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses, and the book
is a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming black in America
that interviews voices from three generations of the Moses fans.
Joe Bennett is a musicologist, writer, and researchers specializing in
(01:09):
the analysis of popular music and songwriting. As a professor
at Berkeley in the Professional Music and Liberal Arts departments,
he teaches classes relating to artists, development, music copyright, and
song analysis. His academic research focuses on the creative practice
and psychology of songwriters. As an expert witness forensic musicologist,
(01:33):
he advises music lawyers, publishers, artists, and songwriters on matters
of plagiarism and musical similarity. Well, hello everyone, I'm glad
to have you here. We're here with Joe Bennett, who's
a professor at Berkeley College of Music. Maybe Joe, the
best thing to do would be to start with you
talking a little bit about your background if you don't mind.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Well, sure, as you said, I'm a professor at Berkeley,
as you can probably tell from the exit, and I'm
not American born, so I'm one of these immigrants that
he hears so much about. I'm trained in the UK
originally as a musician and as a musicologist. When I'm
not teaching undergraduates at Berkeley. My specialism is sort of
(02:17):
song copyright, so that's my main interest as a forensic musicologist.
So what I do is I help students and copyright
lawyers and artists and publishers to figure out whether one
song has been copied from another. And so that's the
sort of commercial end of what I do. But the
academic end of what I do is I just love
(02:39):
analyzing pop music to figure out how it's built.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, that's fascinating. So tell me a little bit more
about forensic musicology. I've never actually heard that term before,
although I can infer what it means. What does that
entail as far as your process?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Sure, Well, it's sort of adjacent to the law profession, really,
and a lot of my commercial clients are in fact
copyright lawyers specialists in intellectual property. And so this usual
scenario unfolds like this. A songwriter A says, hey, songwriter B,
you just had a big hit, and your chorus or
(03:17):
your top line melody or your bass drift sounds a
little bit like mine, or you sampled my drum intro,
that sort of thing, And they talk to a copyright
lawyer who says, well, we need to be sure that
that statement is true. Anyone can accuse anyone of anything.
Let's call an expert musicologist who can do the technical
(03:38):
analysis of the songs and figure out the extent of
similarity and therefore the likelihood that song B is partly
copied from song A. So I help people to resolve
those disputes truthfully and ethically, I hope, with the goal
of everyone getting their fair share of royalties in the life.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
There's a quote from you, and I'll just do it
for our listeners. I take the view that music exists
as a vibrant, living art form in contemporary society and
evolves constantly through new technologies, distribution channels, and cultural dynamics.
I love that. I love that quote, But what what
does that all mean in terms of proving that somebody
(04:21):
stole a core progression or you know, the essence of
a lyrical progression or something. Because I do recognize and
acknowledge that music is progressive, right, and everybody's always building
on what the past was, and there's got to be
some sort of some form of emulation and copying. How
do you what's the difference between that process that happens,
(04:43):
the folk process they used to call it, or just
stealing and lifting a song.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, it's a great question, and really the the which
side of the divide any given case falls is very
much what I'm asked to write about and analyze and opine. Yeah,
as you, I've forgotten about that quote, can't even where
I said.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It or somebody. Yeah, Bob Dylan was a famous theef
of old songs, traditional songs, lyrics, you name it everywhere.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
So that's sort of long and academic quote you just
quoted for me. That that's I guess what I'm representing
there is sort of cultural Darwinism, the idea that the
arts in our society, and music in this case in point,
it functions like a Darwinist ecosystem. So you have endless
variation and mutation, and of course you have heredity. So
(05:38):
as you say, music can't really exist without prior music.
And you know, there's no composer or songwriter alive who's
never heard another song, so everyone's influenced by everything that
went before. And I think romantically speaking, that's that's a
rather beautiful thing. And yet how do songwriters get paid. Well,
they get paid through royalty when the song is played
(06:01):
on the radio or played at a show, or played
on a podcast, and that means that it's their property,
and obviously they have a right to protect that property.
So copyright law is essentially about trying to find that balance.
I describe myself always as an ethical forensic musicologist. That is,
(06:22):
you know, when people hire me, I don't just say
what the client wants me to say. If, for example,
I have a plaintiff client that calls me and says,
you know, justin Bieber stole my melody, I will say, well,
you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Let's look at
really how plausible that assertion is, starting with a melodic comparison.
(06:47):
But as you say, there is no sort of concept
of entirely original music devoid of influence from the past.
So we have in all music what we might refer
to as commonplace elements. And that's certainly the language I
use in my reports. So if we take a genre randomly,
(07:08):
like let's say EDM or disco, disco is something everyone's
familiar with. So in disco music, one of the ubiquitous
elements of disco is a four on the floor kick
drum boom boom, boom boom. So nobody owns the copyrights
on the four on the floor kick drum. You can't
sue someone by saying your kick drum is four on
(07:30):
the floor and so is mine, therefore you infringed my copyright.
That would be a ridiculous world, because everyone likes to
dance to a floor for on the floor kick drum.
So a whole lot of my job, and I love
my job is just listening to a ton of music,
you know, to figure out what's unique about a track
and what are the more generic elements from a which
(07:51):
because we get the word genre.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I mean, I ask you about a specific case that
I'm gonna guess you're you're probably familiar with, has to
do with leads Eppelin and Stairway to Heaven. I think
it was pretty well known litigation. Do you recall that
one Joe.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I Skidmore versus led Zeppelin went through the through the
courts in California for many years.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah. It was initially started with a band that I
used to quite like out in California called Spirit, led
by a guy named Randy California. And I believe they
had a song called Taurus, which I can almost remember
hearing them play live, and they apparently had opened for
led Zeppelin. This is many many years ago, probably in
the sixties, right late sixties. And then the allegation was
(08:34):
that Jimmy Page had lifted part of Stairway to Heaven
from the Spirit song called Taurus. But can you maybe
give some more illumination and enlightenment about that particular case,
just to give everybody an example which everybody would know
led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven, of course, sure happy
to do so.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So that particular, there are a lot of kind of
rather technical legal aspects to it of what was protectable
by copyright and who filed the copyright registration and when,
so putting all that sort of legalize stuff to one
side and just talking about the music. The song you
mentioned was Tourist by Spirit, and what it shares with
(09:21):
Stairway to Heaven is that it uses what in music
theory terms is referred to as a chromatic minor key
descending baseline. So the baseline, obviously nor music's the lowest
thing we hear, and chromatic just means here on the
guitar means going up or down one threat at a time,
so it's, you know, the nearest available note. So famously,
(09:44):
Stairway to Heaven goes like this and it has that
descending baseline, whereas Taurus, which was actually created before a
(10:10):
couple of years before, say in a Heaven, And that's
key obviously to the case, because the who made it
first is the first thing you have to establish. Taurus
goes like this, So obviously they have some similarities. They
(10:36):
both happen to be played starting at the seventh threat
on the D string of the guitar, and they're both
in the key of a minor, and they're both sort
of seventy something beats per minute, which is sort of
you know, classic rock ballad tempo. So they have those
sort of surface similarities, and really, in a copyright playing
(10:57):
things like that don't matter so much because obviously you
can play any song in any key and on any
instruments and at any tempo and it's still the same song.
But the case was obviously about that similarity that when
you play them back to back they do sound pretty similar.
Now spoiler coming up. Led Zeppelin won the case and
(11:20):
Randy California's Airs did not, in fact have a claim
to the copyright on Stairway to Heaven, which obviously wouldn't
be the financially very lucrative copyright to own and the
Stairway to Heaven parties. The Led Zeppelin parties in the
case argued that this chromatic minor key descending phrase what
at Berkeley we would call a line cliche, because it's
(11:43):
so common that lots of composers use it. They argued
that it is in other things, so, for example, my
Phonny Valentine, Sweet Comic Valentine. I think they also mentioned
Jim Jimy Jim Jimmy Jim Jim. There's a whole ton
(12:03):
of songs that use that minor key, far descending bassline,
and I think they went back to the seventeenth century
and found some, you know, some baroque music that did
a similar thing. So that's the classic way that you
demonstrate in a copyright infringement case, at least one based
on melody that plaintiff does not have a case because
(12:25):
it's a commonplace element.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Well, thank you very much. That was exemplified in a
much more convincing manner than most people make their points
on the show. So thank you, Joe.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I'm just an old guitar player who loves to play
led Zeppelin riffs.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Oh thank you, silver Bell. It's Christmas time. Let's move
away from all this technical litigation stuff and get into
the spirit of the season. Joe, and you were the
spirit of the season.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I see what you did there.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
So you were approached by a UK chain of sharping
malls several years ago, I believe, who wanted to commission
a Christmas song to make their shoppers feel happy for
the holiday season. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, it was a whole lot of fun that was. Yeah,
it was it was a commercial project that they there
was this chain of UK mals I guess we call
them in America that and they wanted to commission some
UK songwriters to write the happiest Christmas song possible. And
(13:38):
you know a lot of the time when clients come
up with stuff like that, I said, well, really, you
can't measure music in that way. It's it's an emotional
art form. Who can say whether one thing is happier
than another. But I kind of got where they were
coming from, and so what they wanted from me was
actually some sort of cultural research that would enable them
(13:58):
to brief the songwriters about what kind of song they
wanted to play in these models. So I said, okay, well,
challenge accepted. I'll look at the corpus. That's what any
musicologists would do if you're investing any genre or a style,
you look at the corpus work. So my methodology was
to take for that year, which was was a while
(14:21):
back now, twenty sixteen, the top two hundred Spotify streaming
songs in Christmas Week and subtract all the songs that
were not very Christmasy that left us with a total
of seventy eight songs, and then analyze the actual characteristics
(14:41):
of those seventy eight songs to see what they had
in common, what was interesting about them when they were released,
And we got quite a lot out of the process.
We analyzed music and lyric and I think it was
perhaps the lyric analysis that was the most interesting outcome
from it.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah, that's interesting. So did you actually come up with
a song or Yeah, we actually wrote a new song
based on all these favorable elements from all the old songs.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah. It was a sort of a fun bop in
a I guess fairly derivative of the classic Phil spect
album Christmas Gift for You. So I had a lot
of that sixties you know, sleigh bells and tubular bells,
and that album is obviously so influential on Christmas music
more generally, particularly in America. So the song came out great,
(15:35):
and they sang it in the chain of shopping malls
and everyone seemed happy with the project. And there's a
lot of smiling faces all around.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
So what's the secret formula behind a quintessential Christmas song.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Well, I don't know about secret formula, but certainly we
all know that Christmas songs have certain shared characteristics. So
looking at the yes, the findings of that little research
project that we did looking at repertoire, the most interesting
one was lyric theme. Whenever we do song analyses, and
(16:07):
I do this with my students at Berkeley all the time,
one of the questions I asked the class is you
know what's the song about. What's the core message, the cause,
simple idea behind this song. And it's an exercise that
any of us can do if we think of our
top ten favorite songs and read off the lyric. Normally,
the actual core message of the song is very very simple,
(16:27):
even if the way it is expressed in lyrics can
be very you know, artistic, very oblique, very metaphorical whatever.
In Christmas songs. In a word, the most common theme
in all Christmas music is the word home, the idea
of coming home Christmas or for the holidays or work,
you know, whatever one celebrates at this time of year,
(16:47):
because it's something a lot of people do. You know,
you go back to the family seat, and you go
back off into the place you grew up. Young people
will go back maybe and spend time with their parents
when they've been away but college or out there living
their lives. So it makes the holiday period a time
(17:09):
of sort of homecoming and nostalgia, we might say. And
sure enough, a lot of Christmas music or holiday music
lyrics deal with themes of homecoming and nostalgia. And in fact,
if you think of perhaps the best known and one
(17:29):
of the oldest among the Christmas hits rotation that we
still hear today, that would be Bing Crosby's White Christmas,
originally nineteen forty two. I think even that itself is
a nostalgic Christmas song. You know, the opening lyric, I'm
dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I
(17:51):
used to know, So it immediately evokes nostalgia right there
in the first line.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Oh for sure. And I still love that song. I
love the way I thinks a deep.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Points, isn't it. You know what other records from nineteen
forty two still get into regular Spotify rotation today.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Well, music
in general makes us nostalgic, right, I mean, those songs
that remind us of different times. Christmas is the great.
The greatest example happens every year, and as kids were
always trying to think back to those wonderful times of
our childhood, and so certainly the songs would strike us.
But don't you think songs in general strike some chord
(18:32):
with us of their lyric intensive type songs.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Well completely, because popular music means different things to us
at different times in our lives, at different times in
our own social development. There's an expression I like to overuse,
which is the best pop music in the world all
came out in a single year, and that year was
the year you were seventeen. And I think if we
(18:57):
all think back to when we were seventeen, there was
great records that year. I was born in the very
late sixties, so for me, the year I was seventeen
would have been nineteen eighty seven, So a lot of
big hair rock, you know, you two climbing high in
the charts. Just a whole lot of sort of mid
eighties synth pop was around, and you know, I still
(19:18):
love that stuff to this day. But so the answer
to that question will be different for everyone, depending on
what age they are. But that is of course power
of popular music, because when we hear those tracks from
our youth. To some extent, we get thrown back to
in our minds, to where we were and what we
were doing at that time in our lives.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yeah, for sure. Sadly, my memory would go back to
around the time you were born, which was the late sixties,
around the time I was seventeen.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
So well, that's.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Year for music, though you can Oh, goodness.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
You're so not wrong. Yeah, wasn't that a wonderful time?
And I think maybe at Berkeley we rather romanticize that
time because it's it was a period when basically a
great record was great musicians playing in the studio. That
is to say, you know, live players were recorded on tracks.
Because we have so many great instrumentalists and singers at
(20:16):
Berkeley a lot of the time, a lot of my
students really love that period in music, you know, classic
rock era, when a lot of great records were made
just by musicians being in a room together.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Right, and what are you know? I'll apply this to
holiday songs, but I think it applies to songs in general.
The roots of some of these songs go way back
in time, you know, traditional music, traditional music songs that
maybe go back to the Renaissance, or you know, the
Middle Ages. What are your thoughts about that? Do we
(20:50):
do we bring forward some of those chords and songs
and tunes that are now incorporated into the music that
we listen to today.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, it's a great question. Essentially, popular music is it's
quite a harmonically simplified art form. And I say that
as a musicologist who studies and indeed loves popular music.
That is, we like simple repeating hooks. We like our
chorus is to be memorable. We don't like, for example,
to have a whole lot of key changes in our
(21:19):
popular music. So if you compare melodic content of popular
music with melodic content of, for one of a better term,
classical music of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, you'll
find there's a difference in melodic complexity. And that's not
because hop music is banal or classical music is elitist
(21:43):
or anything like that. It's just that they serve different functions.
They serve different functions for their audiences. So if the
history of popular music, at least in what some musicologists
call the common practice era sort of you know, Renaissance
pero through to the early twentieth century, it's a history
(22:03):
of ever increasing harmonic and melodic complexity.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
I'll ask you one last song, Joe, staying in line
with the theme of today's so show, the holiday theme,
what's your favorite holiday song?
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Well, here's the I'm not a believer, I'm not a
religious person, but it's hard to disagree with wanting to
have peace on earth and families coming together and people
being nice to each other at this time of the year.
So I'm going to have two if i may. I'm
(22:40):
very fond of Tim Mentionin's the song White Wine in
the Sun, which is about bringing and he's Australian, so
of course at that time of year in December, it's
very hot over there, and it's the story of bringing
his baby daughter home to meet his family and all
the reflections that triggers in him in very emotional lyric
(23:02):
But in terms of songs that we still hear today
and what you might call the Christmas rotation, I'm very
fond of a song that came out the year after
White Christmas, called I'll Be Home for Christmas and so
it came out in nineteen forty three, written by Kim
Gannon and Walter Kent, and the whole song is eight
(23:23):
lines and goes like this, I'll be home for Christmas.
You can plan on me. Please have snow and missiletoe
and present by the tree. Christmas Eve will find me
where the love light gleams. I'll be home for Christmas,
if only in my dreams. And it's an epistolary lyric. Obviously,
(23:44):
nineteen forty three a lot of American gis were overseas
in Europe. It was the time of World War Two.
So the idea is he's writing home, this character saying
I'll be home for Christmas, and you know, even if
he won't, even if it's only in his dreams, the
spirit of homecoming and missing those you love is right
(24:05):
there in the lyric. And the fact that it's set
to such an exquisite melody, I think just has really
helped you to stand the test of time.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Thank you, Joe. I can't think of a better way
to end a holiday themed discussion than that one. We've
been talking with Joe Bennett from Berkeley College of Music.
Thank you so much. Joe really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Thank you Mike for having me. It's been great to be.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
A must. We'll be right back after the news at
the bottom of the hour
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