The Royal Musical Association Student Committee is delighted to present an interview with Dr Shaena B. Weitz, recipient of the 2023 Jerome Roche Prize. Her award-winning article, ‘Plagiarism and the Napoleonic Potpourri’ (published in Music & Letters), sheds new light on musical creativity, authorship, and copyright in early nineteenth-century France, uncovering a forgotten genre that challenges our modern notions of originality.

The Jerome Roche Prize, inaugurated in 2001 in memory of the distinguished scholar Jerome Roche, is awarded annually for a distinguished article by a scholar in the early stages of their career. In this interview, Yajie Ye from the RMA Student Committee (ARAMAES Forum) speaks with Dr Weitz about her research on music, media, and culture of the long nineteenth century, her reflections on celebrity and publicity, and the broader implications of her work for understanding musical creativity today.

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Yajie Ye (YY): Congratulations on winning the 2023 Jerome Roche Prize! Could you tell us a bit about your article ‘Plagiarism and the Napoleonic Potpourri’ — what drew you to this topic, and why do you think the panel found it significant?

Dr Shaena Weitz (SW): Thank you so much, Yajie! I want to thank the committee and the RMA again for recognizing my work, and Jo Hicks and Simon Keefe for hosting me so kindly in Aberdeen. So yes, I rediscovered this music genre from a single line in an 1830s French music journal. The quote is something like, the potpourri is no longer viable in our days, because copyright law denies the author the ability to use the pieces he wants, and the genre was especially useful for denouncing plagiarists. I just felt like this was such an intriguing thing to say (denouncing musical plagiarists in music in like 1800!?) I wanted to understand what it meant.

What I discovered was that the potpourri was thought to be a medley, which it was in later years. But the early potpourri, invented in France in 1787, was a little musical game made by putting diverse music excerpts together. So, to appreciate these pieces, you had to be able to recognise the excerpts and discern the relationship between them. It was banned in France in 1810. And it seems to have been mostly a French phenomenon, but I have seen some popping up in other places. But I also determined that while it may have been useful for denouncing plagiarists, there were also other commentaries about musical resemblance hidden in these pieces. In one, the author shows how his own pieces are ‘plagiarised’, and as I read, therefore makes a funny comment about how it is impossible to be truly original.

In some ways I was just lucky to have made this discovery—I don’t expect that I will ever discover a forgotten banned music genre again—but I am pleased that I was able to do the subject justice. I had the sense, from the initial discovery, that this was something potentially complex and interesting. I don’t know what the panel liked about it, except what’s in their official report, but I can say I am proud that I was able to explain something vital about the development of music copyright, and music listening practices hidden away in salons, from this little genre, and to begin from this single line and corroborate the story out of scant records—I mean, I read so much historical French law to figure out when it was banned and why, for a start. There are plenty of interesting things to discover from single lines of text in random sources, so if we are only doing keyword searches, we won’t be finding them. This is my not-so-subtle plug to encourage everyone to read historical materials widely!

YY: Your article examines plagiarism in nineteenth-century potpourri. How was plagiarism understood at the time, and what does studying it reveal about creativity and originality in music history?

SW: Yes! Great question. So what the Napoleonic potpourri captures is a conflict between older, eighteenth-century and earlier, models of musical creativity, which, and speaking broadly here, accepted some level of similarity, or even valorised remaking musical materials to improve them (and thereby show the new author’s skill). An eighteenth-century writer, Marmontel I think, said, if an author leaves an idea fallow, then we must take it and make it productive. So this is what I called creativity ex materia, making something out of something. And by at least around 1790, this was in conflict with newer ideas that prized creativity ex nihilo, or making something out of nothing—being original—that is more familiar to us. Simultaneously, this conflict clashed with new copyright laws, or I should say attempts to develop a system that aimed to protect authors’ rights and creativity ex nihilo. In France, and in Britain and many German states too at the least, there had been protection for works for at least a hundred years, but the protection was for the publisher. The protection barred the reproduction of the wholesale material object, like what we might understand as a ‘knock-off’. It had been legal to recopy a piece but use a different technology or give it a different title page or something and call it ‘different’. Copyright law, by contrast—which basically started in 1793 (though there was a 1770s version)—was meant to protect the author, and at first, similarly barred the illicit reproduction of the wholesale material object in France, basically the same system but rationalised in a different way. This means there was no law that barred taking excerpts and repurposing them, because the system didn’t really protect ideas. But, as my article shows, by 1810, the concept, in France at least, seemed to change. The author was allowed to control how the ideas were presented to others, as their property. Allowing others to reuse ideas, by, for example, repurposing excerpts (to potentially make fun of the author), became illicit as a loss of authorial control. There were eventually exceptions for parody, but that gets complex (and if someone wants a research topic, I’d love to know more), but the potpourri never regained currency in its original form. So I’m not sure why there was this clarification in the copyright law, which was that it was illegal to copy a work ‘in whole or in part’, and the potpourri wasn’t the target of this law from what I can tell, but nevertheless, this apparent clarification signalled a different idea about what plagiarism or illicit copying means.

YY: Much of your work explores the links between music journalism, celebrity, and publicity in the long nineteenth century.  How did the media shape musicians’ reputations back then, and do you see parallels with today’s celebrity culture?

SW: Absolutely. Not to be presentist, but there is plenty of evidence that, just like today, nineteenth-century media was also intervening in the infrastructure of celebrity in various ways. Of course, how this was done is a bit different, but in many ways, the concepts and potentiality of the print medium were incredibly similar. This is especially true if we think about celebrity, following Georg Franck and Robert van Krieken, as a manifestation of the economy of attention. Following this line of reasoning, the historical media seems to work according to celebritised logic about gathering attention and then instrumentalising it. In the West, “objective” news media only really peaked about mid-twentieth century, until deregulation starting in the 1970s, and then social media made the media landscape much more nineteenth-century again. Of course, fully erasing this mode was never realised, especially globally, but nineteenth-century media is often very much like ‘Hey! look at me! Here’s one weird trick to be the coolest person at your party: learn the piano!’ I think we have some idea about how historical media could promote a musician—scholars have talked about puff pieces, where someone gets obviously predetermined favourable press presented under the guise of ‘reporting’. I’ve found in my work various quid pro quos, like a clear trade to sell some music or write an article a certain way, in order to get some favourable press. And the nineteenth century is when we get composers who were also critics, who would write about themselves, and how interesting they were. That’s Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, Schumann, and more. All of these activities needed permission from the journal owner—publishing is always gatekept for various noble and ignoble reasons—, so we start to see the inner workings of publicity—like an awareness that making information public is valuable or powerful and can be controlled to serve various self-interests. I am particularly interested in negative press, which I don’t think we understand very well at all, like how does it serve someone’s interest to denigrate another person. And this is sometimes quite buried, and all obscured and inverted, but I think there is promotion in that act, and I want to understand how it works.

YY: In your research, what’s the most surprising or illuminating thing you’ve found in the archives — perhaps a story, review, or musical detail that changed how you think about this period?

SW: I love this question. The first thing that comes to mind is a discovery tucked away in Katharine Ellis’s first book. And please forgive me for cheating a bit but it will help contextualise. She found evidence that a music journal, in this case the Revue et Gazette musicale, argued to its shareholders that even though the journal ran at a monetary loss, it was worth keeping open because it provided a platform to boost the parent company, a music publisher. This was around 1848. This crystallised so much about the function of music journalism in the nineteenth century for me, especially the earlier part. It suggests that a journal’s primary purpose was not necessarily to provide reasoned criticism, or entertain, or speak for the people, like scholars used to presume. Its primary purpose was to sell. And since the person making this argument could not quantify how much the failing journal earned in sales on the publishing house side, it nevertheless tells us that the owner believed in its power to persuade, or maybe to bully people into publishing contracts, or other as-yet-unknown functions. Now, the frustrating thing about tantalising information like this is that it’s hard to say how common this attitude was, especially for journals not connected to publishing houses, though I believe this was more standard than we realise.

This helps contextualise one of my own discoveries: the same journal’s earlier owner, Maurice Schlesinger, published a piece of music by a composer who ran a rival journal. Although Schlesinger had already paid the composer for the work, and needed, according to the normal course of business, to sell the piece at a standard six francs to make a profit, he deliberately devalued it, pricing it at one franc. He was willing to lose money, that much is clear, but for what?— perhaps to assert power, to undermine his rival, to send a message that the rival’s music was cheap or worthless (even though he bought it)—I mean we can only guess what he thought he was doing. But he clearly could see his power, and act on it, and play all sorts of long games—losing money in the short term—to try to realise them. It’s hard to say how successful he was, eventually he sold the business and then got arrested in Germany and came back to Paris and started a telegraph business, but his methods clearly had an impact on so many others. Add to this the fact that musicians could hire people to applaud for them at performances (and this applause would often get reported in the papers), or that at least one journal owner demanded ‘protection money’ for good reviews, it paints a picture that there was a system of covert publicity that remains largely hidden to the historian. I want to excavate this system—to map what I argue are its semi-predictable pathways—because understanding them will help us better read and utilise historical evidence in more revealing ways. Admittedly, it’s slow going to theorise intentionally hidden mechanisms. Worthwhile, I hope!

YY: Your current project Rescinding Genius explores fame and publicity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. How does this project challenge traditional ideas of “genius” in music?

SW: Thank you so much. This is a bit of a tough one, surprisingly. I am not sure that my work will show much beyond what Tia DeNora argued in the 1990s about Beethoven, that ‘genius’ is a construct, and that various cultural agents come together to build the image of the genius. But, in my project, I’m interested in the opposite phenomenon, or how some composers lost their ‘genius’ status at the same time Beethoven’s was being built. My subjects are Daniel Steibelt, Gioachino Rossini, Frédéric Kalkbrenner, Henri Herz, Johann Nepomuk Hummel. And so I hope to help us understand how these cultural agents worked and wielded power and persuaded, beyond a single case study. What are the mechanisms they employed? And then how might the legacy of their actions affect us today?

My research so far suggests that celebrity developed in opposition to genius—or maybe it’s the other way around— but also that genius uses celebrity mechanisms to situate ‘the genius’ as something different to ‘a celebrity’. I aim to show these mechanisms in action, and work through what I argue is one of the hallmarks of celebritised thinking, which is a kind of multi-layered cognitive collapsing—or basically if X then Y, when X and Y are not equivalent. I argue that studying negative ideas is especially revealing, because it offers an opportunity to break these cognitive logjams—I mean, for example, who would disagree that being a cheat in business is a bad thing, but then why does being a cheat mean someone’s music is a trick? And what do we do when we realise the accusation of cheating is, in fact, fake itself? What is this whole vicious circle going on here? This is just one pattern I see in the discourse about many of my subjects.

I hope overall that this will contribute to a rethinking about how value has been constructed in Western Art music. I think it’s really odd that the music of the ‘greats’—so excellent as it may be—needed to be, or at least was, boosted by scapegoat fallacies and demonised enemies. Isn’t the idea that ‘the enemy’ is simultaneously too strong and too weak a clear hallmark of an effort to persuade upon illogical faultlines, usually employed in fascist regimes? It’s a deeply emotional and confused argument. But we—and I mean scholars, the historical and modern public, speaking very broadly again—have absorbed these ideas, and apparently the petty politics of the past, as everlasting truth, and have ignored all of the weird evidence of manipulation, or at least persuasion. And here it gets tricky, I don’t think persuasion is necessarily bad, but I want to learn more about how it worked in this period, so we can see it working in other periods and places, and how it grew and changed, and how it interacted with different models.

YY: Looking ahead, what questions are you most excited to explore, and what advice would you give to students and early-career researchers who want to connect music history with wider cultural and media studies?

SW: As I continue, I am getting deeper into like this underbelly of history (not to be too dramatic!)—these hidden subterranean infrastructures, where there are patterns that can be observed in sections, but rarely seen whole. I am working on the development of nineteenth-century para-social relationships, gossip as a tool of community-building, and the role of misogyny in constructing value in Western Art music—that one’s very fresh. And I am co-editing a forthcoming volume on cultural intermediaries that I am very excited about—fantastic contributors, fantastic co-editor! (Alessandra Palidda).

For anyone looking to think about music more broadly than they are (and there are so many directions to go in), especially as it relates to media, I would encourage reading widely in historical materials, as I said. Targeted searches are limiting in a certain sense, even though they are efficient in other ways. I would also encourage people to be sceptical about what they are reading, especially in primary documents—and not just general scepticism, but I would advocate to ask specific questions and develop pattern recognition across sources. When you see something that seems unusual or interesting, test it against other situations—does this same dynamic show up elsewhere? Same for something that seems standard, can you prove that it works like this everywhere? What interests do you think lie behind the creation of the document? Who is it for? And what does it do? Think about money—who paid for it, and who got paid. Even if you don’t know at first, you can start to develop hypotheses and then be on the look-out for answers in your other reading. I’m afraid my other advice is rather generic, to read as widely as you can outside music! And also, be yourself, be curious, be kind. I just don’t think it’s worth it if we’re not doing that.

Thank you so much for talking with me, Yajie, and for your great questions.

YY: Thank you so much, Shaena, for this thoughtful and inspiring conversation—and warmest congratulations once again on receiving the Jerome Roche Prize. We can’t wait to see what comes next in your research journey.