Hook
A broke accordionist in Naples discovers that a tune he improvised at the Cumana station is being transcribed nightly by a mute old man who sells the sheet music three streets over as "newly discovered Neapolitan folk, 18th c." — and academics are buying it.
Escalation
- Instead of exposing him, the accordionist joins: he starts composing deliberately, aging the melodies with deliberate copyist's errors, and the old man's fake provenance stamps turn a Tuesday improvisation into a conservatory exam piece within eight months.
- Other buskers want in. A Senegalese kora player, a teenage violinist who begs in the funicular, a man who plays wine glasses — they form a dues-paying collective that invents an entire lost school of Neapolitan composition, complete with a tragic figure named Rosaria Coppola who died in the 1884 cholera epidemic, because tragic women sell better than living men.
- A German musicologist builds her career on Coppola, wins a prize, and brings a film crew to Naples to find the neighborhood where Rosaria lived; the buskers must physically stage a past, and the teenage violinist — who has begun to believe she's Rosaria's descendant — gives an interview that contradicts the official forged biography.
- The forgery is exposed by the most banal thing possible: a copyright claim, when a car commercial licenses "Coppola's" aria and the publishing money has to be paid to someone with a tax ID.
✦ Twist
In the depositions, the collective's fraud collapses not because the music was proven fake but because it was proven *good* — the court rules the works are original compositions by living authors and awards them full authorship and back royalties. And the moment their names are printed on the scores, the concert halls stop programming them. The pieces go back to being street music. The old man, finally granted a byline, keeps transcribing under Rosaria's name anyway, because a dead woman is the only artist anyone was ever willing to hear.
💡 The engine is that authorship, not sound, determines who gets listened to — so the only way for a street musician to be heard indoors is to stop existing.