In today’s NYTimes, Ben Sisario offers “6 Takeaways From Ed Sheeran’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ Copyright Case.” I liked this part:

“5. Musicologists can be vicious to each other.

A key part of any music copyright trial is the testimony of musicologists hired as expert witnesses for each side, who present dry, abstract analyses of the music.

At the Sheeran trial, the two experts also seemed to take every opportunity to put each other down. Stewart, a professor at the University of Vermont, portrayed his counterpart, Lawrence Ferrara of New York University, as struggling to find persuasive “prior art” — citations from music history that would undermine the originality of “Let’s Get It On.”

Ferrara fired back. He dismissed Stewart’s estimate that 70 percent of “Thinking Out Loud” had been taken from “Let’s Get It On” as “ridiculous” and “outlandish.” Stewart’s hypothesis that Sheeran had mimicked some of Gaye’s melodies, Ferrara said, was, “to be perfectly honest, absurd.” Other conclusions by Stewart were “farcical” and “ludicrous,” Ferrara said. For musicologists, these were fireworks.”

Granted that these guys, like lawyers, are being paid to rep one side or the other. And of course, at least in private conversation, they’d agree on certain “truths” about a song — what chord THAT is, or what the rhythmic relationship is between THIS chunk of vocal and the drums. But as soon as they begin to abstract from a purely literal description, subjectivity reigns, and it’s plausible for two “experts” to stake out diametrical positions about a question as simple as “Is this melody quite similar to that one?” It’s like a scene from “Inception” where people fight by reordering the fabric of physical reality in surprising ways, hoping to make their opponents fall off the side of a building or get crushed in a rolled-up stretch of concrete (or am I thinking of “Dr. Strange”?).

Again, allowing that court rooms are shameful playgrounds of bad faith argument, logical incoherence, and hypocrisy, where “experts” in any number of fields fling their integrity down a sewer grate for $$$, musicologists seem uniquely empowered to build invisible little castles of argument out of load-oblivious materials. Nothing against the field, which has many competencies both fascinating and valid, but the “expert” theater from this trial seemed dishonest even by courtroom standards (okay, grotesquely dishonest, per courtroom standards), and characteristic of song plagiarism beefs.