I had a nightmare last night. Absolutely terrifying.
Though not as scary as 80s movies...
My best friend and I went to a Santana concert (That’s not the nightmare part; I love Santana!) for his birthday. Santana opened the concert with one of my personal favorites, Black Magic Woman. The crowd went wild and cheered like…well, people at a Santana concert.
Musicians must be ridiculously busy these days; Right after Black Magic Woman, he announced that the next one would be his last for the night.
His next song was familiar to me somehow; not because I’d heard it on one of his albums or anything…it felt more…personal. That’s when I realized – he was playing my song! I’ve been working on Jazz piece for about a week now, and Santana was playing it onstage, but better because he’s freaking Santana.
Granted, that made absolutely no sense when I woke up. I’m pretty familiar with Santana’s style, and I’m almost certain he wouldn’t be caught dead playing the sort of song I’ve been working on. What’s more, he didn’t have the instruments necessary. But still, my nightmarish encounter made me worry that I actually did steal the melody for the song from somewhere. Maybe not Santana. Maybe not even a Jazz song – but maybe I heard it once in passing…?
Fun fact: Cryptomnesia is the word for attributing a stroke of someone else’s brilliance to yourself, without realizing it. It’s as if your brain decides to buy a novel, or a CD, tears off the label, hands it to you in the form of some sort of Gelatinous Idea Goop, and then tells you to write it. And then when it’s time for you to present a demo tape to your favorite record company, you look like a dummy because the whole thing’s just covers of Disney songs.
Has this ever happened to anyone? I almost stole a melody once. While it wasn’t a note-for-note rip-off, you could definitely tell where it was from. Luckily, I realized it mid-song and stopped the monstrosity before it even had a chance to take its first breath.
After a careful listening of the last several Jazz songs I remember hearing, I am now fairly confident that my work is my own, but still…it makes me sort of nervous…
I didn’t realize there was a word for it, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. In Helen Keller’s diary, she talks about how she wrote a story that got published, and then someone pointed out that it had the same plot as another children’s book her parents read to her before she became blind and deaf. She had internalized it without realizing. I’ve done similar things, although usually it’s just one small aspect of the plot that I unknowingly include from a different source, an aspect that’s easy enough to change. It certainly is nerve-wracking!
By: Kate on January 16, 2012
at 2:10 pm