In fact, Fastball’s songwriter Tony Scalzo has never made any bones of that fact.
But so far no one has sued - perhaps because cooler, more classical, heads intervened before the lawyers started counting up all the Beamers they could now buy.
A sad effect created by a series of slow descending triplets ending on a sustained tonic is basically what unites these two songs, as it does to hundreds of tunes in the thousand years of composing before today.
I haven’t looked, but it is always traditional for someone to point out that somewhere Bach - or Purcell or Mozart - did this or that “pop music cliche” first.
I am sure they are right.
The problem begins with today’s working musicians, managers and lawyers knowing basically nothing of music before 1986 - or if we are lucky - before 1956.
So when they hear a pop cliche repeated in an pop song, the only thing they can reach for, mentally, is a slightly earlier pop song, unfortunately still ‘under copyright’, rather than its earlier use in the pop music of centuries’ earlier, fortunately now OUT of copyright.
The sort of musicologists-for-hire that tend to seek to get hired in these sort of copyright cases are a slimy lot, not at all ignorant of the long history of pop music cliches, but willing to play ignorant ...if the money is right.
Academic musicologists with no financial skins in the game, need to intervene, as friends-of-the-court, to point out how ancient and threadbare (but how always effective !) the supposedly copyrighted cliche actually is.
I LOVE effective ancient musical cliches and believe that music composition, like novel writing, is really the art of arranging commonplace words (ancient musical motifs) in a personal unique order - not in inventing the novel out of a totally unique language that no one else understands - which how most judges, lawyers and juries seem to think music is written....
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