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Music: Which Cultures are Known for Plagiarism? Essay

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Plagiarism is merely theft, it is the worst kind of stealing where a person takes the intellectual property/ ideas of another person and tries to pass them as his own, in other words it is simply cheating on oneself and others. Plagiarism occurs in many fields such as writing, technology, play production, architecture and many others… But in this essay we are going to focus on plagiarism in music , specially that in the Arab world people are still ignorant of such kind of plagiarism, and there is barley any effective law that protects musicians from plagiarism. So how can a musician “quote” or use a musical part without plagiarizing it, and which cultures are known for plagiarism? To answer the first part of question, musicians can …show more content…

Many composers were known to keep copy books with them at all times in order to write down any inspiration that they may get from hearing other pieces. For example: Mozart knowingly copied a Clementi sonata for the overture to his Magic Flute. Schubert introduced many tributes to Beethoven in his14th String Quartet
Recently in the 1950s, Shostakovich sarcastically commented on the issue of plagiarism in music by using a part of the famous "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," in his Prelude No. 15 in D Flat, Op. 87. Moreover, contemporary modern American music had fell in the trap of plagiarism and they had stolen many Arabic music and used them in there own songs, where there tunes had added an oriental different style adding on to musical piece, yet it was done illegally making it plagiarism and the pioneer in plagiarizing Arabic music to be used in American music is non other then one of the most famous American producers and composers Timbaland. Where he stole the music from “khosara” a song by Abdel Halim Hafez and used it for “Big Pimpin” by Jay-Z the song was an instant hit in US and the world due to the oriental flavor and the richness of such mix. Another was “Don’t Know What To Tell Ya” 2003” sung by Aaliyah before she tragically died in an airplane accident the tune of that song was taken from “Batwanness Bik” by Warda on of the most known songs in the Arab world , another songs to add to the list are : Justin Timberlake –

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