choro trivia: who's the thief?

[John Morton]

I read through Pixinguinha's Generoso today, and recognized the 3rd part from somewhere. After some head scratching I realized it's also the 3rd part of Lecerda's Gorgulho, though in a different key.

What's going on here? No original copyright dates, so don't know which appeared first.

John

[Doug Hoople]

Nice catch, John. Neither one of those two pieces gets played much up here, so the re-use of that particular C section hasn't come to our attention, except, possibly, among the choro-drenched pros like Jesse and Eva.

Re-using good pieces of music has a long history, and, considering the vast catalog of choros, it's a wonder that it doesn't happen more often.

Broadway composers, for example, were notorious for lifting bits that they liked out of shows that didn't really pan out to use again in new shows they were working on. I believe that it was a rare composer who didn't engage in the practice.

In classical music, it worked much the same way, especially before the Romantic era (when the concept of uniqueness developed much greater importance). Music was as much craft as art, and new pieces of music were fed churn-'em-out to patrons like so many pieces of furniture out of a carpenter's workshop. Mozart, Haydn, Bach and Handel, among many others, worked in positions that demanded a steady succession of new, major works, and they never hesitated to rework old material into new pieces. Vivaldi, in particular, re-used so much of his material that we joke that he wrote only one piece of music and re-used it 500 times.

Pixinguinha and Lacerda were collaborators. You see them credited together as often as not. So it's not surprising that they might have shared material. It is interesting, though, that for all the sharing of titles, each of them appears to claim sole authorship of each of these tunes.

Pixinguinha was prolific, and many of his melodies sound like they were lifted out of instrumental improvisations. It's possible that this particular section was in his head with miles and miles of other stuff and that he simply lost track of where it actually came from when he had an A and a B.and was stuck for a C.

All just speculation on my part. The real story is likely to be much more interesting. The truth always is. Anyone with any insight into this particular case?