Great Composers

Great Composers Music

Great Composers full mix with vocals mp3
Great Composers backing track mp3
77 song medley on the chords of Great Composers
Great Composers lyrics

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Activity

The horn lines all are quotes of famous tunes: How many can you identify? Discuss in the Ping Sing discussion group

Learning the song

Teachers and students should print the score. It is intended that students learn the song with the dots as well as the lyrics. Students do not need to know exactly what the notation means, but can follow along with the general shape of the notation.

You can download the mp3s and put them on your ipods. You can burn them to CD. You can plug a laptop in to some speakers to practice along with. Record or video the class and upload this to your blog(s).

About Great Composers

As a musician, everything you play or compose draws from everything you’ve heard in your lifetime. We’re all constantly borrowing and copying expanding our musical vocabulary. Remixing is just an extension of that. If you’re worried that “ripping off” is a bad thing, then have a think about how the original composer would feel about it: If you like someone’s work enough to want to rework it, you need to do it well: Take it somewhere they would never have thought of… truly make it your own and give them the credit, kudos and respect they deserve. Then they’ll be honoured by it. And remember, in making the original, they were probably ripping off someone else too!

Composer Igor Stravinsky said: “Good composers borrow; Great composers steal”, which is a phrase that he had himself ripped off from the writer T.S Elliot, who had written: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Hmmm, I prefer the depth of T.S. Elliot’s original, but Stravinsky’s rip off is so catchy! Funnily enough, the painter Pablo Picasso, who was a good friend of Stravinsky, went on to say, “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal”… it’s a case of one art imitating another art!

So, when it came to writing this song, I changed Stravinsky’s line to enhance its meaning, making the first half more bumbling to set up the punchiness of the second half. I then put it to a reggae groove (which is often borrowed!) and tried to impersonate a few of the vocal styles often used in reggae.

The 1564 (C G Am F) chord progression, which is bizarrely popular in pop music at the moment: It’s hard to know if people just stumble on that progression, maybe because it triggers a memory (of all the past songs that have it!) or whether they think, “hmmm, today I’ll pinch that chord progression from U2″. Who knows?

I made it so it would work as a round, to get an “interweaving cycle of karma” feel to it! Writing a round is like doing a musical jigsaw, as every line has to harmonize with every other line… fun! If you want to try making a round, start simple: Just one line that works nicely as a melody, but also harmonizes if you put the first half over the second half… it takes a lot of fiddling!