Samuragochi has been described as a "modern-day Beethoven" who pours "despair, hope and prayers" for those living in the "confused modern world". Confusion is unsurprising, given that he has now confessed that someone else had written his most famous works, including Symphony No. 1 'Hiroshima', Sonatina for Violin and the theme music for the video games Onimusha and Resident Evil.
One ghostwriter, Takashi Niigaki, has further accused Samuragochi of faking deafness. To adapt Gilbert & Sullivan, things are not what they seem, soy milk masquerades as cream.
The New York Times reports that
On Wednesday, Mr. Samuragochi expressed remorse for the deception, though he did not reveal why he chose to come forward at that particular moment.
“Samuragochi is deeply sorry as he has betrayed fans and disappointed others,” said a statement released by Mr. Samuragochi’s lawyer. “He knows he could not possibly make any excuse for what he has done.”
The reason for this sudden repentance became clear on Thursday when the ghostwriter revealed himself to be Takashi Niigaki, 43, a largely unknown part-time lecturer at a prestigious music college in Tokyo. Mr. Niigaki said he had written more than 20 songs for Mr. Samuragochi since 1996, for which he received the equivalent of about $70,000.
He said he felt so guilty about the deception that he had threatened to go public in the past, but Mr. Samuragochi had begged him not to. He said he finally could not take it anymore when he learned one of his songs would be used by the Olympic skater. He told his story to a weekly tabloid, which went on sale Thursday.
“He told me that if I didn’t write songs for him, he’d commit suicide,” Mr. Niigaki told a crowded news conference. “But I could not bear the thought of skater Takahashi being seen by the world as a co-conspirator in our crime.”
Perhaps just as shocking was Mr. Niigaki’s assertion that Mr. Samuragochi was never deaf. Mr. Niigaki said that he had regular conversations with Mr. Samuragochi, who listened to and commented on his compositions. Mr. Niigaki said the deafness was just “an act that he was performing to the outside world.”Most writing about authenticity and identity in music centres on performance, with for example exposes of recordings attributed to Joyce Hatto, controversy over lipsynching in live performance (oops, Milli Vanilli) and acknowledgement that some singers in feature films were 'assisted'.
Having a ghost write your score does however have a long history. Henriy Desmarest (1661-1741) ghosted for Louis XIV’s chapel master Nicolas Goupillet. Austrian dilettante Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach (1763-1827) reportedly passed off the work of composers such as Mozart. In 1989 Italian modernist composer Vieri Tosatti claimed that he was responsible for work claimed by Giacinto Scelsi.
'Class, Ideology, and il caso Scelsi' by Eric Drott in (2006) 89(1) Musical Quarterly 80-120 notes
it was an interview with the composer Vieri Tosatti published a few months after Scelsi's death, in the January 1989 issue of the magazine Il giornale della musica, that helped ensure the latter's continuing notoriety. In the course of the interview, entitled “Giacinto Scelsi, c'est moi,” Tosatti recounts how Scelsi had employed him as an assistant over a period of some twenty-five years, from the 1940s to the early 1970s. In this capacity Tosatti, along with a stable of other assistants Scelsi hired over the years, helped produce many of the scores that in the 1980s would win the composer a wide following among critics and aficionados of new music. Despite his claim to have acted more as a ghostwriter than as an assistant, effectively composing much of Scelsi's œuvre himself, Tosatti expresses no desire to claim this music as his own, deeming it to be of negligible artistic value. He insists that his intention is to clear away the “mystification” surrounding Scelsi's compositions, which he attributes to critics either too unscrupulous or incompetent to recognize Scelsi's lack of genuine talent: “If I am now going to say some things that won't cast a positive light on Giacinto Scelsi's figure as a composer, this doesn't mean that I had anything against him. I do have something against the mystification whereby Scelsi's music is taken to be good, just as one hundred percent of what the accredited critics consider to be the music of our time is taken to be good.”Rosemary Brown (1916–2001) gave ghosting another meaning, claiming - like Henry James' scribe Theodora Bosanquet (1881-1961) - that she took dictation, often on a daily basis, from the illustrious dead. Liszt supposedly reported - via Ms Brown - that
We in spirit hope to help people to realise that they are evolving souls destined to pass into the realms of non-matter where they will continue to evolve. This realization should give them a whole new dimension of thinking, and raise their self-image above its earthbound limits.Brown took spectral dictation from Chopin, Beethoven, Delius, Rachmaninov, Schubert, Grieg, Brahms, Gershwin, Schumann, Debussy, Berlioz, J.S. Bach and John Lennon. George Bernard Shaw filled in her time by dictating a play, Caesar's Revenge. Bertrand Russell and Rupert Brooke contributed their thoughts. Van Gogh - another one of those people whom Nicolas Slonimsky characterised as masters whose careers, until rescued by the zany Ms Brown, had been "fatally affected by their protracted states of death" - even put in an appearance.
She explained that "I've always had the ability, ever since I can remember, to see and hear people who are thought of as dead". Reminiscent, alas, of quite a few people whose ills are addressed through court-ordered medication.
Brown was happily not entangled in the copyright problems evident in the 1927 Cummins v Bond ('Chronicles of Cleophas') and the 2000 Schucman ('Course in Miracles') disputes (the latter involving dictation by no less than Jesus Christ), noted here.
