Was Michael Hoenig a fraud?
KolonKu
Member Posts: 87
When Baldur's Gate I and II came out, composer Michael Hoenig seemed to come out of nowhere and gave us two soundtracks of amazing quality and depth.
However, I've recently stumbled upon cases indicating that Hoenig got "inspiration" from elsewhere. When BGEE1 came out it was revealed on this forum that the battle music "Attacked by Assassins" greatly resembled the intro of an old series called "Lifeforce" from the 80s (?) as the following comparison reveals for those who haven't yet heard it:
Attacked by Assassins:
youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfwq5SBQ3Q
Lifeforce intro:
youtu.be/eaam5Eso1hU?t=10
As far as I remember this was merely recieved as an interesting sidenote and not a huge deal. However, the music played when the character enters the town of Brynnlaw sounds very similar to a 17th century composer called Henry Purcell and his "The Fairy Queen" suite. Compare the following clips:
Brynnlaw:
youtube.com/watch?v=vX1SdEWa1pw
The Fairy Queen Suite:
youtu.be/0QDu-lM06Ac?t=1813
The same can be said about a track played when visiting certain houses (referred to as "Crooked Crane" in the BGII OST Youtube video:
The Crooked Crane
youtu.be/W80tmfVcQCo?t=996
The Fairy Queen Suite:
youtu.be/0QDu-lM06Ac?t=1701
With this in mind, the question has to be whether there are other yet undiscovered similarities out there and if we've wrongly accredited Hoenig for several of his compositions. What do you guys think about this?
However, I've recently stumbled upon cases indicating that Hoenig got "inspiration" from elsewhere. When BGEE1 came out it was revealed on this forum that the battle music "Attacked by Assassins" greatly resembled the intro of an old series called "Lifeforce" from the 80s (?) as the following comparison reveals for those who haven't yet heard it:
Attacked by Assassins:
youtube.com/watch?v=Mgfwq5SBQ3Q
Lifeforce intro:
youtu.be/eaam5Eso1hU?t=10
As far as I remember this was merely recieved as an interesting sidenote and not a huge deal. However, the music played when the character enters the town of Brynnlaw sounds very similar to a 17th century composer called Henry Purcell and his "The Fairy Queen" suite. Compare the following clips:
Brynnlaw:
youtube.com/watch?v=vX1SdEWa1pw
The Fairy Queen Suite:
youtu.be/0QDu-lM06Ac?t=1813
The same can be said about a track played when visiting certain houses (referred to as "Crooked Crane" in the BGII OST Youtube video:
The Crooked Crane
youtu.be/W80tmfVcQCo?t=996
The Fairy Queen Suite:
youtu.be/0QDu-lM06Ac?t=1701
With this in mind, the question has to be whether there are other yet undiscovered similarities out there and if we've wrongly accredited Hoenig for several of his compositions. What do you guys think about this?
Post edited by KolonKu on
8
Comments
Any chance you could turn the above ^^^^^ into proper links?
You'll get a lot more response and they are worth listening to and comparing but currently it's a PITA to do so.
OK so that said, thanks for finding this, yes it's all a bit naughty.
Using Purcell, well fair enough, out of copyright and the more people who listen to Purcell the better.
The Lifeforce steal though, that's bad.
Mancini wrote the original and it's better IMO. Should really be credited.
Like the way in the comments on the YouTube originals somebody has mentioned Baldurs Gate though. There's a lot of fans around, any obscure reference and they turn up.
Well, one nation.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.music.led-zeppelin/7-VdOyul_cI
overall nothing new
BG and BG2 music is amazing by the way, even if stolen. ;]
The Lifeforce steal might warrant a lawsuit and could spell trouble for the plagiarist.
I think about the stunning shots of nude Mathilda May in Lifeforce...
Variations of the Sea theme in Heroes of might and magic IV can be heard in several games and other media. Someone at the Heroes Round Table forum once asked the composer about it and got the answer that it's probably because they used audio samples from the same catalog. You can read the old thread about it here for more details and the composer's answer. So what they are doing there isn't actually plagiarizing, just a different kind of composing that builds on snippets of music that already exist.
But as I said, I don't actually know anything about how Hoenig worked on these games. Though those are two really good arrangements of the parts from Purcell's The Fairy Queen and I'm glad they exist.
I'm not so concerned with plagarism so much as not being informed what is being plagarised.
For me it would be very nice/helpful to have the source credited so that I can explore the original, possibly find other pieces of music that I might enjoy, listen to the differences ect.
I can't be the only person who has heard bits and pieces of something then had to go through a long search to find what's been sampled and ended up finding something that I really enjoy listening to.
Happened quite recently, the song sampled sounded interesting, had to search for it through a "song lyric". Luckily managed to find it and I was right, it's a great song that I now listen to regularly and some of the artists other work.
Plus although I have an absolutely appaling memory for names of tunes, the tunes stick and it's infuriating to come across something I know I've heard before perhaps in a different form, the sample reminds me that I like that piece of music, then I can't trace the original.
To add to what I wrote above there's also accidental plagiarism. Like Flaming Lips who wrote the song Fight Test and realized a tiny bit too late that it's almost identical to Cat Stevens' Father and Son.
And Roger Waters from Pink Floyd thinks that Andrew Lloyd Webber has plagiarized parts of Echoes in The Phantom of the Opera. Which I find kind of funny since it's basically just a chromatic scale. I played the same melody on the piano when I was five years old before I had heard either of them. Plagiarism in music is just a very tricky question.
It is indeed true that nearly all good creators get some of their ideas from someone else's work. What distinguishes a good creator from a hack, though, is the capacity to turn someone else's idea into their own.
For example, West Side Story is essentially Romeo and Juliet, but it's been reworked enough to make it work and not look a mere sham or forgery. That's very different from blatant musical theft.
Now, as to where the limit stands between what's allowed, and what's not allowed, what's fair and what isn't, the law is not really clear. Here's a document made by an attorney that sums everything up:
https://www.tmea.org/assets/pdf/southwestern_musician/MusicalArrangementsCopyrightLaw_Jan2011.pdf
But then again, reality doesn't necessarily match this exactly, and it essentially boils down to whether you are somehow earning money on the back of the copyright owner, and not benefiting them. Videogame music covers that earn money from ads on Youtube are theoretically illegal, for instance, because they broadcast a copyrighted piece of work. But the game studio that owns the right would be totally counterproductive in suing the arranger. If anything, the arranger advertises the game, eventually earning the copyright owner more money, so one may see that as an unofficial advertisement agreement, a win-win situation.
Michael Hoenig's case is quite different from that though. He totally had the right of taking Purcell's work, slightly rearranging it, reinterpreting it and claim the rights on that. My opinion is that he still should have credited Purcell, but it's not a must-do, legally speaking. The steal on Mancini's work, however, definitely was a steal since Mancini's work is not 100+ years old. So unless a deal was made between Michael Hoenig and the copyright owners on that work of Mancini, this was stealing.
As to whether he is a fraud or not, well it's not like 100% of his work was actually stolen. The major part of it wasn't. He's treading on thin ice, that's for sure, and he was not fair play on everything. He did appropriate things that weren't his, but IMHO there's a major difference between having done 90% of what you pretend you have done, and having done 10% of it, and until the contrary is proven I will consider Hoenig to be in the former case - that is, not entirely fair, but not a barefaced fraud either. Eventually pretty much every music made today is somewhat of a rearrangement of bits of music made centuries ago.
Now, the music of the past centuries is indeed influential, and much of pop music is just a recycling of cliches even by its own standards. But your claim is still much too strong.
I mean, this is still true to a degree. Movies and books STILL use tropes and story structure that is older than print.
The structural viewpoint can be used to make statements that are completely true but so general that they also fail to say anything interesting. For instance, it would be true to say that all human lives are structurally identical in the sense that they consist of birth and then a series of inhalations and exhalations followed by death. That's it. This is true, but does anyone think it's an interesting structural analysis?
Unique art would, in any case, almost certainly be meaningless, as there would be no norms concerning its reception. The trick is in contravening such norms just enough and in such a way as to raise interesting questions about them, not abandoning them altogether.
My main point is that it's fallacious to say everything is just a recycling of old ideas, or that if this claim is made in such a way that it is correct, it is also made in such a way that it's too sweeping a generalization to actually say anything interesting. And I am happy to concede that certain forms of art definitely seem to be only in the recycling business - this is why (in my view) there hasn't been anything interesting in mainstream movies for decades, and very, very little of interest in pop music, too. (Although I do find it both charming and fascinating that approximately every two years or so, someone manages to write a very good pop tune with the age-old C-Am-F-G chord progression.)
Please remember: this does not apply to all electronic music.
CLEAR cut rip-off IMO - very disappointing.
Thankyou for doing this.
I wouldn't say it's disappointing because I would never have heard the "original" and that's a great piece of film music, well it's Mancini so expected.
What's wrong is the way so many of these good compositions for film/TV are disregarded and forgotten. Or used without proper creditation. They don't seem to be catalogued much where you can easily trace them.
It's very gratifying when the opposite happens though. Theme music for the old Robinson Cruso TV series, wow, that's been really picked up and appreciated which is great to see.
Worst example of this is adverts, it's all very well when you can recognise the piece, but how many times do they use something, especially composed more recently, and it's a hell of a task to trace something when you want to hear the whole piece.