The Creativity Of Copycats

Commenting on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, Popova considers the composer’s tendency to plagiarize from soloists in his orchestra “without credit, creative or financial, to the originators”:

[Music writer and historian Stanley] Dance called him “the greatest innovator in his field, and yet paradoxically a conservative, one who built new things on the best of the old.” It was, no doubt, a compliment on the mastery with which Ellington built on the legacy of jazz, not a dig on his unabashed creative borrowing that bled into plagiarism. And therein lies another eternal human paradox that Ellington embodied: Is it possible to be both a plagiarist and an innovator? Ellington lived the answer with remarkable aplomb.

But the real question, of course, isn’t whether creativity is combinatorial and based on the assemblage of existing materials — it is. What Ellington did was simply follow the fundamental impetus of the creative spirit to combine and recombine old ideas into new ones. How he did it, however, was a failure of creative integrity. Attribution matters, however high up the genius food chain one may be.

Previous Dish on Ellington here and here.