The academic year looms and with it a sputter of tsk-tsk-ing amongst the commentarial classes regarding academic dishonesty. Again we in the professorial biz feel compelled to remind our charges that copy & paste is not research, that sharing papers around the dorm commons is not kosher, that cheating will make you go blind, cause hair to sprout on your palms, and pepper your face with pimples.
One would think that cheating would be at a minimum at a conservatory. Such is, after all, a professional school filled with clear-eyed folk who have gone into this difficult yet rewarding profession with eyes open, chin high, and feet firmly planted on the road of artistic and intellectual integrity. That’s true often enough to be downright inspiring, but it isn’t always the case. To be sure, you can’t cheat your way through a concert; it’s either you playing or it isn’t, and technological whiz-bang goodies such as Diskclaviers are strictly verboten in conservatory recital halls. Even were such devices available, they would be of little use to violinists or singers or oboists, etc., none of whom have been blessed/plagued with automated “player” versions of their instruments.
No: when it comes to the actual business of performing music before an audience, honesty—at least of a sort—prevails. My slight qualification stems from the lamentable practice of copying interpretations from recordings, either consciously or not. But whether that actually constitutes plagiarism or just absorbing influences remains a moot point. Ditto composers who ape the idioms and styles of their model composers of the moment, writing echt Stravinsky or ursatz Copland or faux Messiaen. That’s all part of the growing-up process. Young pianists sometimes need to play the Horowitz out of their systems, just as young composers might need to write out the Bartók.
Plagiarism, as it occurs within a conservatory, tends to restrict itself to academic classes, including those in musical subjects. We may state at the onset that it is almost impossible to cheat in a solfège class, apart from the childishness of copying a dictation exercise from one’s neighbor. Solfège belongs in the general performance category, and is therefore largely immune.
But theory, history, and literature are other matters entirely; they are just as subject to academic dishonesty as any other academic subject involving reading and writing and papers and research and reports. My all-time champion example of blatant dishonesty comes from a class I taught some years back on the Haydn symphonies. One particular student displayed such notably wandering eyes that I sat her apart from the other students during listening quizzes. This student blessed me with a paper which stands so far as the most transparent and hapless example of plagiarism in my entire teaching experience. Her subject was Symphony No. 45, the “Farewell.” Rather than study the symphony and write a paper about her own discoveries, she seems to have found a Russian-language program note or liner note somewhere, which she proceeded to run through computerized translation software. She handed the paper in, apparently without ever having read the results of her copy-paste-Babelfish strategy. It abounded with toothsome howlers such as “tool executants” for the players in the orchestra, culminating in a gloriously surreal passage regarding the symphony’s finale:
One after others fall silent tools, musicians, who finished their parts, dissipate the spark plugs, which burnt before the panels, and depart.
It took me a while to figure out just what this meant. Eventually I realized that “dissipate” meant blow out, “spark plugs” meant candles, and “burnt before the panels” meant on their music stands. So altogether: One after another, the musicians fell silent as they finished their parts, blew out the candles on their music stands, and departed.
Before I hauled her up before the Inquisition I ensured that she hadn’t just written the paper in Russian and then resorted to computerized translation. We had a brief conference. I asked her to tell me what happened during the last minutes of the Farewell Symphony, and she could not. I asked her to define “spark plug” for me, and she couldn’t. Thus reassured that my suspicions were justified, I threw the book at her.
Cheating also occurs in music theory classes, but detection isn’t always all that clear-cut. The average harmony exercise is constructed in such a way as to allow only a limited number of successful solutions, so a run on identical settings from a class is the norm. In harmony exercises, mistakes are the bellwethers for dishonesty. When you see precisely the same set of goofs show up in a series of assignments, you’re probably looking at copying. Not always: some exercises have been constructed with Machiavellian precision, designed specifically to lead careless schmucks down the tubes into a parallel fifth or unresolved seventh or some other crime against humanity. But we seasoned-vet professors know all about those examples, and are not misdirected when victims go toppling off the cliff, like so many lemmings dropping into the sea. Unmistakable cheating is happily rare, and I have never keelhauled an innocent bystander.
I have yet to encounter cheating in more advanced theory classes, such as my Schenkerian analysis course. Would it be possible to cheat in a Schenker course? I suppose one could attempt to track down a chart online, but I require all of my students to turn in handwritten charts, so I really doubt if anybody with half a brain would fail to recognize that copying a chart is in some ways a lot more bother than making your own. Besides, slackers don’t take year-long courses in Schenkerian analysis. (Well, I did encounter one notably feckless student who did just that—attracted, I think, by the class meeting only once per week. He didn’t last long.)
For some years I played on an Alaskan cruise ship during the summers, and one year I heard about the antics of another pianist who played the ship later in the season. Apparently he had worked out a seduction technique in which he would make a hand copy of, then play a lesser-known Chopin Nocturne or Mendelssohn Song Without Words for his target young lady. He would tell her that he had been awake all the previous night writing the piece just for her. Apparently this worked well enough to keep his hormones balanced, until wiser members of the staff decided to blow the whistle by spreading the word about Casanova’s little scam.
But on the whole musicians are an honest bunch, whether students or professionals. Well, at least in academic and performance venues. As concerns software, musicians tend towards blatant thievery, hence the firm protective measures attached to most professional music applications, in the form of authorization keys or even obnoxious hardware dongles. Nor have musicians shown much in the way of moral fiber concerning downloaded music, a particularly sad state of affairs given that they are stealing from their own colleagues.
Still, compared to some other professions I could name—I don’t think I have to, do I?—musicians can point to a halfway decent ethical track record, all things considered. We’re too poor to have taken kickbacks à la politicians, the very nature of our work precludes our presenting other people’s work as our own, à la historians or journalists, and we don’t display any exceptional propensity towards diddling pre-teens, à la clergy. Oh, there are exceptions in every category, but even a moral monster like Richard Wagner shed his miserable human faults when he composed. And perhaps that’s why we’re such a responsible bunch, on the whole: we are bathed in and surrounded by great art, stuff that cannot come into existence without utter integrity. You can cheat writing a term paper, but you can’t cheat writing the Eroica.