It happens at odd moments, usually when I'm doing something mindless. I'll be humming a favorite song as I tie my shoe and suddenly the melody will remind me of another song I've heard.
Maybe it's just my obsessive nature. Driving home from a wedding one chilly night, it occurred to me that the first four notes of "Here Comes the Bride" and "Oh, Christmas Tree" are identical. They don't sound identical because they start on different beats but sing either song a capella--just the first four notes--and you'll see what I mean.
Such similarities abound in popular music, hiding in plain sight and begging to be noticed. The verse to the Beatles "Misery" is not unlike the "Nationwide is on your side" jingle. The third and fourth measure of Christopher Cross' "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" is real close to the refrain from the Mary Tyler Moore Show intro. "How To Handle A Woman" from the Broadway show Camelot reminds me of Yes' "And You And I" and "Benny The Bouncer" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, each melody starting with ascending fourth intervals.
Composers recycle their own music all the time--that's what constitutes a "style", for better or worse--but the trick is to divert the listener's attention. The Beatles often borrowed from themselves but they always covered their tracks. The first six syllables of "Please, Please Me" and "Nowhere Man" use the same four notes, virtually in the same order, but differences in tempo, chords and lyrics obscure the similarity. "Dig A Pony" and "Instant Karma" share the same three-note chorus intervals with the "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" stuff in "She Loves You", but none of those songs sound alike.
Reusing your own tunes is one thing, but where a former Beatle ran into trouble was when he borrowed from a non-Beatle source. George Harrison was found guilty of "unconscious plagiarism" when a judge deemed the melody of "My Sweet Lord" to be more than a little imitative of the Chiffon's "He's So Fine" written by Ronald Mack seven years earlier . John Lennon chided his ex-band mate in print, saying that if George had simply changed a few notes, he'd have never been sued.
Lennon was no one to talk. He freely admitted to borrowing a few lines from Chuck Berry for the opening verse of "Come Together". John, like George, had to compensate the plaintiff, but his next act of liberation was pulled off with total impunity.
Unprotected by copyright law and long dead, to boot, the composer of "Stewball" could scarcely complain when his 18th-century folk ballad about an English race horse reemerged in part as Lennon's 1971 holiday classic "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Nor could he reach across the centuries to throttle the composer of the equally-similar "Come Back to Jamaica" TV jingle that aired in the early 2000's.
Maybe it's just my obsessive nature. Driving home from a wedding one chilly night, it occurred to me that the first four notes of "Here Comes the Bride" and "Oh, Christmas Tree" are identical. They don't sound identical because they start on different beats but sing either song a capella--just the first four notes--and you'll see what I mean.
Such similarities abound in popular music, hiding in plain sight and begging to be noticed. The verse to the Beatles "Misery" is not unlike the "Nationwide is on your side" jingle. The third and fourth measure of Christopher Cross' "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" is real close to the refrain from the Mary Tyler Moore Show intro. "How To Handle A Woman" from the Broadway show Camelot reminds me of Yes' "And You And I" and "Benny The Bouncer" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, each melody starting with ascending fourth intervals.
Composers recycle their own music all the time--that's what constitutes a "style", for better or worse--but the trick is to divert the listener's attention. The Beatles often borrowed from themselves but they always covered their tracks. The first six syllables of "Please, Please Me" and "Nowhere Man" use the same four notes, virtually in the same order, but differences in tempo, chords and lyrics obscure the similarity. "Dig A Pony" and "Instant Karma" share the same three-note chorus intervals with the "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" stuff in "She Loves You", but none of those songs sound alike.
Reusing your own tunes is one thing, but where a former Beatle ran into trouble was when he borrowed from a non-Beatle source. George Harrison was found guilty of "unconscious plagiarism" when a judge deemed the melody of "My Sweet Lord" to be more than a little imitative of the Chiffon's "He's So Fine" written by Ronald Mack seven years earlier . John Lennon chided his ex-band mate in print, saying that if George had simply changed a few notes, he'd have never been sued.
Lennon was no one to talk. He freely admitted to borrowing a few lines from Chuck Berry for the opening verse of "Come Together". John, like George, had to compensate the plaintiff, but his next act of liberation was pulled off with total impunity.
Unprotected by copyright law and long dead, to boot, the composer of "Stewball" could scarcely complain when his 18th-century folk ballad about an English race horse reemerged in part as Lennon's 1971 holiday classic "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Nor could he reach across the centuries to throttle the composer of the equally-similar "Come Back to Jamaica" TV jingle that aired in the early 2000's.
If John and George had at times neglected to change a few notes, Paul McCartney was ever-vigilant in forestalling accusations of melodic thievery. He literally dreamt up the tune to "Yesterday", Paul has explained in countless interviews since 1965. He awoke one morning with the tune lingering in his head and he went straight to a piano to capture the notes before they evaporated from his waking memory. He then spent weeks humming it for everyone he knew, convinced that he must've heard that haunting melody somewhere before.
But no one recognized it, so Paul finally accepted it as his own. With the addition of some appropriately remorseful lyrics, "Yesterday" would become one of the most popular songs of the twentieth century, composed by a young Paul McCartney while he slept.
You just can't keep a good melody down, as a tune crafted by an unknown French composer has exemplified for centuries. Commonly but erroneously attributed to Wolfgang Mozart (who was only five when it made it's first published appearance in 1761), it has served double duty for two hundred and fifty years as both "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and that first-grade favorite, the "ABC" song.
As for my own songwriting, I'm compelled to re-work anything that sounds a little too familiar for its own good. Only once have I allowed a few stolen notes to remain in one of my songs because I knew they would never be traced to their source, a TV commercial for Sugar Pops cereal that hasn't aired since nineteen sixty-seven. Obscure, granted, but that jingle was catchy enough to remain stuck in my subconscious for the next forty years.
Ultimately, there are only so many notes in the scales of Western music and you'd think it's next to impossible to write a fresh melody nowadays. But I still hear new stuff on college radio that sounds totally original and surprisingly innovative.
It's encouraging to see that at least some young songwriters have taken John Lennon's sage advice to heart: If it sounds too familiar when you first come up with it, just change a few notes and you can call it your own.
It's encouraging to see that at least some young songwriters have taken John Lennon's sage advice to heart: If it sounds too familiar when you first come up with it, just change a few notes and you can call it your own.
