Outrageous musical hoax - uncovered with Adobe Audition

Well since the previous posting it's all exploded all over again - both with Barrington-Coupe's "sort-of" confession, and with the French media getting wind of my location.

My favourite version of the 'confession' is this one...

I rather like the "Le Pot aux Roses" graphic at the beginning!

Bob

I didn't know this one until a couple of French papers used it in their headlines, as well as the TV people - "découvrir le pot aux roses", according to my Harraps dictionary, "to uncover the secret"...

Very appropriate, Monsieur Rose!

 

Bob

In http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1466154.ece Mr Barrington-Coupe reveals that the editing of others' performances into those of his wife was achieved on a minidisc.

Indeed, you can achieve remarkable results that way.  But this doesn't quite explain the time stretching etc.  Nor have I seen any explanation of the orchestral recordings - difficult still to understand how Joyce Hatto remained in ignorant innocence of those.

I think something other than the audio is still being stretched.   I doubt whether the whole truth will ever be known.

I think something other than the audio is still being stretched.   I doubt whether the whole truth will ever be known.

You're not kidding. The man is a convicted fraudster, for heavens sake. Nothing he's said so far convinces me of anything about this at all - other than that he's a fraudster!

The other reason that I don't attach any particular credence to any of these reports is that they are created by journalists, and they are, from my own personal experience, experts at making mistakes, sometimes wilfully.  In the one referred to above, for instance:

More detective work followed and a BBC sound engineer tested sample tracks of Hatto and Simon and discovered two were the exactly the same and another had been doctored.

Are you still on a retainer, Andrew?

Andrew turned up on my iPod yesterday  , in a segment on NPR.

[Yes, I would do it again,” he says. “Because it made Joyce so happy]

The more I think about it, the less plausible I find any of what Barrington-Coupe says and does to be. For instance:

On the piano stool sits a box containing Joyce’s ashes. Her grieving husband still can’t decide what to do with them.

Oh yes he can - he puts them symbolically on the piano stool for when interviewers from whom he wishes to elicit sympathy turn up. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he insisted that it was a woman reporter that interviewed him, and that's not being sexist in the slightest on my part - it would have been coldly calculated on his. In fact that whole scene in the music room sounds totally contrived.

How about this bit, though?

Before I leave, I ask him what he would do if he were faced with the same situation again.

He looks puzzled. The next day he phones to say he’s been thinking about this until 3am. “Yes, I would do it again,” he says. “Because it made Joyce so happy. But this time I wouldn’t publish the CDs.”

So she knew about this then? Doesn't half sound like it...

Ask Barrington-Coupe exactly what he has edited, and from whom he has plagiarised and when, and he responds with the somewhat implausible explanation that the more he reveals the more people will hound him. “Whatever I do, it won’t be enough. They want to see me kill myself because they want to believe that I can’t live with myself.”

I think he's got that back to front. All it makes me feel is that my original supposition about how much he's plagiarised (everything for which there is no corroborating evidence) is correct. If he wants to be left alone to rot in peace, he would be better off confessing the full extent of it now. The less he admits, the less anybody will think of him, I'm pretty sure. I don't want him to kill himself at all - that would be too easy a cop-out. I want him to have to live with this very publically for a long time, and save everybody else a lot of quite unnecessary hard work.

Barrington-Coupe is like any other cornered rat - he will do anything at all to escape from the hole he's in. Nothing that leaves his lips, unless corroborated, is to be trusted in the slightest, especially if it's been mediated by a journalist - he can see them coming. He should be sued, and bankrupted - proper sackcloth and ashes job.

On a technical level, it should be quite easy to disprove any stories about minidiscs, incidentally. And where's the evidence that he had even the basic equipment to make good recordings in his home? He claims to have been able to insert missing notes, editing with a minidisc recorder? Who's he trying to kid?  I've actually tried doing this - his claims about being able to do this are baseless.

For an example of bad journalism how about this:

Sitting in what was once Joyce’s music room and latterly her bedroom, Barrington-Coupe looks an unlikely conman, even though he has a history of fraud, having been jailed for tax evasion in the 1960s. With his wild grey hair and mournful tone, he exudes the air of a retired music master who doesn’t quite know what to do with himself since the death of his beloved wife.

What does she expect a conman to look like...a conman? duh!

I don't attach any particular credence to any of these reports is that they are created by journalists, and they are, from my own personal experience, experts at making mistakes, sometimes wilfully. 

My personal definiton of a journalist is: a person who is paid for writing on topics he or she has no slightest clue about. 

That article is one of the worst examples of journalism I've seen so far in this story, though it has to be said, when you stack up the British press against just about all the rest they come out very poorly indeed - lack of research, lack of understanding, lack of basic thought, and ready to swallow anything they're fed.

Perhaps British newspaper journalists are just thick - the day after the story broke I took eight calls from two Mail on Sunday journalists, going over the same thing time and time again as you might when talking to a small child - and when their story finally came out 9 days later it was still crap. The Telegraph journalist who called the same day got the basics right, but then wrote the first Barrington-Coupe interview (where he denied everything - a shamefully poor example of journalism that) without question. Whilst I've done lengthy interviews for American, Canadian, French, Finnish, German, and Icelandic journalists, some of it purely for background and fact-checking, the British press has often simply reprinted the errors from each other's stories - or introduced new ones - and shown very little interest in getting off their bums and doing any real work.

The Sunday Times article, then parroted by AP and thus distributed around the world, is simply another example of this attitude.

Looking first at the reference to me: "a BBC sound engineer" - no, not for 3 years - it would be nice to give my company the proper credit. You might as well say "a schoolboy from Worcestershire" and credit my high school. "...tested sample tracks of Hatto and Simon and discovered two were the exactly the same and another had been doctored" - wrong again, as even the most basic reading of our site, or even easier, picking up the phone, would have told her.

Elsewhere: "Barrington-Coupe looks an unlikely conman" - surely this is the first requirement for conning people. "With his wild grey hair and mournful tone, he exudes the air of a retired music master who doesn’t quite know what to do with himself since the death of his beloved wife" - well he's had a couple of weeks to brush on this particular act, hasn't he? "Hatto’s Steinway piano, which once belonged to Rachmaninov" - I find that very hard to believe; this was part of the Hatto myth spun around the faked CDs. "On the floor lie piles of her CDs, spilling out of boxes, still in their wrappers" - a) they're not hers, b) a few days earlier he said he'd destroyed them all.

"On the piano stool sits a box containing Joyce’s ashes" - goodness me, he's really going for the heartstrings here. Maybe they were - I bet she didn't look to check! But it's all about the sympathy story, isn't it? "Always a perfectionist, Joyce Hatto sat here at the Steinway trying to achieve two notes in a piano transcription of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony that sound, says Bar-rington-Coupe, like a cuckoo. “Several hours passed. I’d been shopping and made tea, and I said to her, ‘How much longer are you going to be play-ing?’ On her 49th go she said, ‘That’s what I’ve been wanting.’ And the birds in the garden all began to sing!”" - unbelievable - literally! Makes the sleevenotes about mythical conductor René Köhler sound convincing.

I could go on, but it;'s just too easy.

OK, guys, Hands up - who thinks they could take two different recordings of, say, something complex by Liszt, played by two different pianists in two different studios with two different mics on two different pianos, and start dropping sections of one into the other, using a MiniDisc, without it being a) crap and b) about as obvious as an elephant in a kindergarten? Come to think of it, how many of us could manage it convincingly - undetectable on good headphones to trained ears - after hours or days of mucking about with EQ, reverb, FSE, adjusting stereo placement, compression, whatever?

The only thing that says to me is that he didn't actually do it himself - he got someone else to do the studio work. Either that or he's still convinced of the continuing total stupidity and gullibility of the average British journalist and their willingness to believe anything and everything the old fraudster comes out with...

Perhaps British newspaper journalists are just thick - the day after the story broke I took eight calls from two Mail on Sunday journalists, going over the same thing time and time again as you might when talking to a small child - and when their story finally came out 9 days later it was still crap. The Telegraph journalist who called the same day got the basics right, but then wrote the first Barrington-Coupe interview (where he denied everything - a shamefully poor example of journalism that) without question. Whilst I've done lengthy interviews for American, Canadian, French, Finnish, German, and Icelandic journalists, some of it purely for background and fact-checking, the British press has often simply reprinted the errors from each other's stories - or introduced new ones - and shown very little interest in getting off their bums and doing any real work.

I suppose that it's not too surprising that Andrew is even more annoyed about this than I am... and for a lot of the same reasons! 

Journalists actually make some of this stuff up from scratch, to support some of the rather flimsy ideas and suppositions they pick out of the air. I have several examples - and that's just the ones relating to me. I'm pretty sure that they do this to everybody, and I'm also pretty sure that the British press may well be the worst offenders. The worst of it of course is that most of it is willful - they deliberately distort and fabricate just to make stuff more sensational - it's not just stupidity and laziness, although this is undeniably a large part of it.

It seems that last month New Yorker did an extensive review of this story.