Composers who copy melodies they had already written before — Page 2

I think you're going to be hard pressed to find anything that's exactly note for note. That being said...the first time I saw PASSION and heard HAPPINESS...I could have sworn I was listening to an incarnation of TOO MANY MORNINGS. Several parts of both songs sound very similar to me.

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I don't really hear Somewhere That's Green and Part Of Your World, beyond how they generally relate to all that guy's balladish songs.

NYLG, you're right, they are similiar melodies, although I like "Happiness" better and it soon takes off in a different direction from the other song.

I dunno. There are only so many notes and combinations of notes, and a composer with a long career is bound to start copying his or herself.

A funny Sondheim one my friend pointed out to me. I thought she was crazy, but she told me she thought some random part of Assassins was ripped off from some random part of Into the Woods. She thought it was in the song "Another National Anthem" but she wasn't sure about which part of Into the Woods it was. I listened to the song and determined that the bits of the melody that go like this:

"There are prizes all around you if you're wise enough to see. The delivery boy's on wall street and the usherette's a rock star!"

Wherever it does that in the song reminded me of:

"We can't sit around and dither while her withers wither with her."

Apparently that's exactly what she was thinking of. I'm sure he's used that little bump de dump like 5 million times but I think it was a pretty random thing to notice!

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Thesbijean, care to elaborate? Wicked and Children of Eden sound NOTHING alike.

The opening vamp of ROXIE is the same as MAYBE THIS TIME.

Did you maybe mean "Funny Honey" instead of "Roxie"? I don't know about note for note, but that's a similar vamp to "Maybe This Time."

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Lot's of composers go back to a riff that they wrote previously and expand on it. I know if you look in a lot of weird places you'll find the start of something brilliant. Cy Coleman, Kander and Ebb, and Sondheim do/did this very frequently and it makes you smile when you hear the evoulution of a song.

However, there are whole shows that are simply that, Theme and Variation. Let's talk Lez Mis for a moment. It feels like there are only three melodies in the whole show. Javert sings a variation of the same melody for the entire show except for stars and his death song. Themes and Variations can make for a very enjoyable evening.

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The Day for the Cat in the Hat has a certain similarity to some strains of Ragtime, yes. But that seems to me to be because Flaherty's whole style of composing has ben fed with elements from Ragtime. After all it was their biggest hit and people usually keep stylistically not to far away from what worked well. There are moments in A Man of no Importance and Dessa Rose as well which could be trunk songs from Ragtime stylistically.

Frank Wildhorn -
The vamp from "The Glory" in "Civil War" is used again in Dracula. Haven't seen either, I just know "the Glory" and hear a clip from Dracula that had that same theme.

And Part of Your World and Somewhere That's Green aren't the same--even when they say "part of your world" and "somewhere that's green," the intervals are different.

Funny, I was listening to Ragtime today, and in the musical interlude after "Sarah Brown Eyes," right as Coalhouse was coming out of his daydream, there was an orchestrial melody played that I SWORE was "One Small Girl" from Once on this Island. I know A&F uses a lot of variations on themes in their work, but I didn't know they did that between works. (J/K, J/K! (That's right, I just said "J/K," you got a problem with it?))


And I know they are different composers, but I've always thought that the opening music of "Master of the House" was strikingly similar to that of "Willkommen." Just a thought.

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Jerry Herman copies himself!

From Hello, Dolly! "Oh yes, it takes a woman, a dainty woman, a sweetheart, a mistress, a wife."

From Mame: "Oh yes we need a little Christmas, right this very minute, candles in the window..."

The melodies here are extremely similar. I still LOVE Jerry Herman though!

AIDA: in "Fortune Favors The Brave" the melody for the part "It's all worked out, my road is clear, the lines of latitude extend " is directly from Elton's own hit "I'm Still Standing" and it is so disturbingly obvious!