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Musicians Are Wired to Steal Each Other's Work

The rules of Western music limit originality in songsand the human brain doesnt
want it, anyway.

Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, performing at a concert in Morocco

Youssef Boudlal / Reuters

PHILIP BALL
SEP 14, 2016

SCIENCE

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It dont matter what you do, / Hey, hey its all up to you.
You have to be of a certain age to appreciate the irony in this permissive paean,
sung in 1977 by Randy California (n Wolfe), the guitarist of the rock band Spirit.
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Earlier this year, a trustee for the late Wolfes estate implied that it matters very
much what you do, attempting to sue the rock legends Led Zeppelin for stealing
Randys music. The lawsuit, heard in June, alleged that Zeppelins Jimmy Page
lifted the famous ngerpicked acoustic opening of Stairway to Heaven (1971)
from Spirits 1968 instrumental Taurus.
Led Zeppelin are no strangers to such accusations. Their iconic Whole Lotta
Love, from their 1969 album Led Zeppelin II, brought a whole lotta trouble when
the blues artist Willie Dixon realized that it used some of the lyrics from his 1962
song You Need Love. On the same album, Bring It On Home borrowed from
another of Dixons songs (this time with an identical title), while The Lemon
Song was partly derived from Howlin Wolfs Killing Floor.
This doesnt exhaust the accusations of musical theft that Page and songwriting
partner Robert Plant have faced. Part of the problem, says the music psychologist
Richard Hass, of Philadelphia University, was that, particularly in their early days,
Led Zeppelin had the habit, time-honored in blues music, of jamming around a
known tune to construct new songs. Maybe they just got a bit lazy about hiding the
origins, Hass says. Their main problem, though, was probably making enough
money that a plagiarism lawsuit becomes worthwhile: Stairway to Heaven is
estimated to have earned Page and Plant almost $60 million.
It looks all the worse to see a bunch of white guys getting rich by drawing on the
works of lesser known and sometimes impoverished black artistsunfortunately
another time-honored tradition in popular music. Led Zeppelin reached an out-ofcourt settlement for the borrowings from Dixon in Whole Lotta Love, as well as
lucrative settlements with a branch of Chess Records for the other legal suits
brought in response to Led Zeppelin II.

Is similarity enough to qualify as plagiarism?

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But the latest case concerning Stairway was dismissed by the court. While Page
testied that the band used to jam to another of Spirits songs from their
eponymous 1968 debut album, he denied ever having heard Taurus until
suggestions of the similarities began to appear online. You can judge for yourself
from several juxtapositions on Youtube. To my ear, theres certainly a similarity to
the musical fragments.
But is similarity enough to qualify as plagiarism? The question is more complicated
than it might seem.
You might imagine the issues arent so dierent from those in other artistic elds,
especially literature. Charges of stealing someones ideas, as the historians Michael
Baigent and Richard Leigh claimed of Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code, are murky.
But if you can put the words side by side and show the overlap, as happened for
allegations against How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, Kaavya
Viswanathans much-hyped 2006 debut novel, the case is pretty clear. So surely
you can do the same comparison with notes and chords, right?
But in music its not that simple. The stringing together of notes and chords is
bound by rules far more constraining than those that govern linguistic grammar
and semantics. In pretty much all of Western music outside of the 20th-century
avant-garde, only a limited number of sequences of tones and chords sound
right, while others seem wrong. So its very likely that, if you come up with a
sequence of chords that sounds good, someone else will have already used it.
Crudely speaking, two chords t together well if theyor the scales on which
theyre basedshare many notes in common. Countless songs use a shift from C
major to A minor, for instance (think of the rst lines of Leonard Cohens
Hallelujah), because the respective scales are closely related. The relationships
between chords can be represented as a kind of spatial map of harmonic space,
showing which are close together and which are far apart. Typically, Western tonal
music uses chord sequences that make only small steps in this space from one
chord to the next. The paths are very limited, especially in the strongly formulaic
and melodic forms of pop and rock. So expecting songwriters to avoid all echoes of
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other songs is a little like putting someone inside a maze and telling them to nd an
original way out.

As we listen to music ... it gets literally imprinted in the

neurons of the part of the brain ... that processes harmony.
One of the key defenses in the Stairway to Heaven case was that Pages opening
chord structurea descending minor chromatic progressionis very old, dating
back at least to the baroque era. (It also appears, Page attested, in Chim Chim
Cher-ee, from the movie Mary Poppins.) And the chord progression in the songs
raucous nale, A minor to F major via G major, is a textbook example of harmonic
proximity that has appeared in countless other rock and pop songs, including Bob
Dylans All Along the Watchtower.
This harmonic map of chord relationships becomes so mentally ingrained as we
listen to music that, at least for musically experienced listeners, it gets literally
imprinted in the neurons of the part of the brain (within the prefrontal cortex) that
processes harmony. No wonder we stick so closely to its pathways.
Melodies, toothe tune of a songare highly rule-bound. Melodies in pop,
classical, and non-Western music all tend to use predominantly small steps
between the pitches of successive notes. They also tend to rise and then descend
again, in a kind of arc. At the simplest level, this gives us the rather banal melodic
trajectories of nursery rhymes. Pop musicians are often scarcely much more
inventive: It always seemed to me that the tunes crooned by Morrissey, of the
Smiths, do not dare to venture beyond about a three-note range. But the truth is
that, if you want to pen a hummable melody, there arent many options in any case.
Purely in statistical terms, then, youd expect that the rules of pleasant harmony
and melody will end up generating rather homogeneous bodies of music. Pop and
rock mostly juggle with an extremely small range of artistic choices, and often
genius and innovation is a matter of putting old wine in new bottles.

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