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Comment by asjfka | Hacker News Reader

Georges Brassens is an iconic French singer. In 1953, he composed the music for "Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux". Then he reused the exact same melody for "La prière". Why not? Ideas get recycled and remixed all the time. Melodies and beats are ideas.

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And a as a musician I can't tell you how many times I played a melody or a line that I really liked only to realize later that it is from another song I have heard years ago.

It even happened that I played the same melody from a song I had created myself without realizing it.

That is not the issue and it is unavoidable. Musical youtube however is full of "Use these three chords to create great music" recipes. There is just so much stuff that doesn't even try to do anything interesting.

> Musical youtube however is full of "Use these three chords to create great music" recipes

Sounds awfully familiar, like the discussion about synthetic art and generative text. They threaten the professionals with lower barrier to entry, but only take the new comers so far.

To many people, me included, "more chords" doesn't mean more interesting. Better melody, lyrics, rhythm, playing, etc. does. You can do wonders with 3 or 4 chords, some of the best music is written that way and doesn't need modulation or other things musos care about to be great. Heck, you can wonders with one chord and a drone note.

I agree. However I am more of a tone person anyway. I am all for few chords, but at least try to find your own way of playing them.

An even more iconic example is the anti-fascist song, Bella Ciao. That actually started its life as a worker's protest song of the same name but with very different lyrics, 50-80 years before its use at the end of the second World War.

Does that detract in any way from the anti-fascist song? Of course not. Folk music has always done this, and that has never taken anything away from its creativity (talking about actual folk music with collective authorship, not commercial music in the "folk" style).

Even J.S. Bach did reuse some of his works.

For example parts of the famous Christmas oratorio are originally from a secular cantanta:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tönet,_ihr_Pauken!_Erschalle...

The composer of Total Eclipse of the Heart went on to use that song and several others of his almost exactly (but with German lyrics, sometimes translated, sometimes new) for a musical [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Vampires_(musical...

Jim Steinman (that composer) wrote a musical called "The Dream Engine" as his senior thesis at Amherst. It leans heavily on the idea of the defilement of youth. After that he tried to create a rock musical based on Peter Pan. Virtually everything he did after that was a reworking of the ideas from those efforts. It's as if he spent his whole career trying to perfect that one theme of defying mortality.

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