How do you feel about Mel Brooks as a composer.... — Page 2

He doesn't write theater music, he writes jingles. Frank Wildhorn, move over!

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He's still the composer. You'll finmd that many of the great names in the biz wrote lead or theme sheets, then had an arranger turn them into piano versions, then an orchestrator created a full score.

Brooks may be more involved than we know. Or less. But still, the show wouldn't have existed if he didn't hum into a tape recorder...

Irving Berlin could only play the black keys on a piano, but nobody calls him any less a composer.

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Mel Brook's method of humming melodies into a recorder and then having a trained arranger figure out harmonies and come up with form, modulations and all those other goodies is how a lot of pop music is written these days. Do you think Janet Jackson or Mariah Carey carefully debate the virtues of half-diminished versus minor seventh chords when they "write" songs for their albums?

Coming up with a catchy melody and clever lyrics is no small achievement, and arrangers who can add harmonies and other musical details are a dime a dozen. (That's not to take anything away from the brilliant work Glen Kelly did on The Producers.)

ETA: I just had a very disurbing thought, imagining what the Grey Garden's score might have been like if Mel had written it.

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Updated On: 7/1/07 at 08:20 AM

I like him, for what it's worth.

Drama, I think you hit the nail on the head pretty much for me. I listened to The Producers when it was released. After a few listens, the songs just seemed to be the same. I got kind of bored with it fast. Maybe in the show they came off better. I will probably never know because the OBCR kind of turned me off and I didn't want to see the show. And I keep thinking that the music for Young frankenstein will have the same feel. I think this will be a big test for Mr. Brooks. I do want to see this show as the movie is one of my all time favorites. We'll see.

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After hearing it, I actually turned down the chance to get premium seats when Lane and Broderick were in it. And they were offered to me for free as a gift. Looking back, I kind of wish I had but I am not really upset that I didn't.

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Competent

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Wait he can't read music? Unless there's a medical reason behind that, IMO there's no excuse not to learn to read music if you're going to write songs.

Humatune... many people that compose music, cannot read music. You don't have to be able to write notes on a page, to have a good tune in your head. But that's just my opinion...

Of course not MrsVampyre. Maybe he thinks learning to read music will inhabit his creative process I don’t know. I just don’t understand why he wouldn’t want to learn and I’ll leave it at that.

I'd hate to think that the world could possibly be deprived of some wonderful music, purely because the man who comes up with the melody thinks "but I can't read music! I'm not a composer, therefore I won't share this with anyone, I'll just forget about it".

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Humatune - who knows why he never learned to read music? Maybe for some people it's hard to put down the tune you have in your head into notes on paper.

I guess people express themselves musically in many different ways, some sing, some play an instrument, some write lyrics, and some do a combination of the above.

Why are you bringing up different cultures? I'm talking HERE. There is no excuse why someone in America can't learn to read music. It's laziness.

Composing music is more than writing or humming a melody. You need chords, you need structure, you need harmony, you need balance, etc etc. That's why I don't call what Mel is doing composing.