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Posted by chris howell on February 21, 2007, 7:47 pm, in reply to "Re: Hatto? Ha!" Chris
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Thanks Alistair.
No doubt thoughts will continue to come to my mind and I'll either revise or supplement my article in, say, a month's time.
But it's only just dawned on me that the sole source - subsequently requoted by others - for most of the more glorious episodes in Hatto's earlier career is the article by Burnett James.
Those of us whose memories go back to the 1960s at least know well that Burnett James was a prolific and reliable writer, and the article was written in 1973 while the sun still shone on Hatto's future. So it seemed all right.
But for some reason - we could all think of a few now - it wasn't actually published, but surfaced 30 years later because Hatto herself had kept a proof copy he had sent her. In the meantime Burnett James has died.
On the face of it, is it likely that a musical journalist of ths kind would have written an article except to commission from a magazine? That being so, the magazine would have had to pay his fee, so why not publish it? And, correct me somebody if I'm wrong on this, but wasn't Burnett James editor of Hi-Fi News and Record Review around that time and so able to publish what he wanted?
The odds are, then, that the article is as bogus as the rest, quietly planted while things were at the beginning, to be made use of later.
And isn't it odd that the article is copyrighted by Joyce Hatto? Unless she commissioned it from him and paid him for it on the understanding that it became her property - a most unusual practice - copyright should belong to either the magazine that commissioned it, even if it didn't publish it, or to the Burnett James estate.
The trouble is, if we are to regard as suspect anything in this article that is not independently corroborated elsewhere, it doesn't leave very much.
Why choose Burnett James out of the many deceased writers available? I'm beginning to see a pattern here. In view of Hatto's obsession with "unwarranted criticism", a little research - no, a hell of a lot, that's the trouble - might show that she had found a way to dance on the grave, metaphorically, of a critic who had actually slated her.
Just another thing. I noticed this morning that one of the letters about Mussorgsky's Pictures is mostly word-for-word identical to Hatto's comments on the piece in Ates Orga's article. A neat spot of cut'n pasting as a warm up before getting down to the days real copying?
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