While noodling around on my flute, I wrote a melody and started to develop it. It never went anywhere, but every now and then during the lull of a practice session I'd play it and think that someday I'd like to write a B section and flesh out an entire song. BTW, I'm not much of a song writer, my skills are improvisation and arranging and I've rarely finished writing a song, so this was no exception.

Fast forward >> >> >> I bought a CD of an LP I had when I was young, Dave Brubeck's "Time Further Out" and I was enjoying the recording. It brought back "old friends" like "It's A Raggy Waltz", "Far More Blue" and eventually "Maori Blues" and as soon as I heard "Maori Blues" I heard the melody I had been noodling around with for years.

It was almost note for note. I guess my subconscious remembered it, and my conscious mind thought it was my own.

Since I could identify the song that the melody came from, it was unintentional plagiarism.

I think it was Igor Stravinsky that said, "A good composer steals, a poor composer plagiarizes."

So if you steal snippets from enough songs and put them together in a way that sounds familiar but no so familiar that you can't identify it as someone else's song, I guess you are a good composer.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
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