What else can you be when it comes to something like this? If LLoyd Webber was some sort of hack who had never composed anything of any merit whatsoever, you could maybe say that he wasn't credible as a composer. But as he's responsible (at least in part) for several great tunes, and, granted, a fair few that are less great, all we can really say is that your personal preference leans more towards others in his field.



I'm not a big fan of musical theatre at all, but I enjoy [isome[/i Webber and Rice stuff as much as I enjoy [isome[/i Rogers and Hammerstein stuff. And more than I enjoy most Gilbert and Sullivan stuff. I say that as a classically-trained musician, not as someone who has suffered a lack of 'cultural mobility'.

But – to use an analogy – I know that Keats and assorted others wrote poetry that was amongst some of the finest that this country has produced in a great overall tradition of literature. I can even understand why (at least partly). But I don't have to actually [ienjoy[/i that verse or feel a need to pick it up.



So my objective and subjective analysis would not be the same – but there's no contradiction there.

It's easier with Keats with him having been dead for a couple of hundred years. Who's to say if you had encountered the works of the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in two hundred years time, instead of encountering the works of the charmless, pug-faced Tory Andrew Lloyd Webber over the last twenty years, you wouldn't feel like you do about Keats' output: not for me, but has some artistic merit?

I'd like to think I can separate the man (or woman) from the work, though.



Wagner wasn't a particularly nice bloke (although not in the way he's been demonised in the wake of WWII), but that doesn't change the [ufact[/u that he is critically regarded by experts as being one of the three composers who, single-handedly, changed the face of serious music. And I can know both those things and say that I love some of his work – not all: some of the vocal stuff is not to my (subjective) taste, whereas some of the purely orchestral stuff is.



Debussy – a bit of a sod. Doesn't mean that [iPrelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune[/i isn't a stonkingly fabulous work and one of my own personal favourite pieces of music. But that latter point equally also doesn't mean that I think him to be in the (for want of better words) top layer of the pantheon of composers.



And I think you can apply it to living composers (or any other form of artist etc).



Personally, I'm not particularly into – say – Jimi Hendrix (yes, I know this is probably heresy). But I appreciate that that's a matter of subjective preference and not an indicator of Hendrix's importance both in terms of his place within the rock pantheon and the quality of his work within the context of rock music. There's some camp pop that is almost too much of a guilty secret to declare here (and I'm not talking about pop that could be defined, within that genre, as masterpieces of the short, air-light song) – but while they give me much personal pleasure, I'm not daft enough to pretend for one moment that they have any particular musical quality or that my liking them makes them better than, say, Hendrix.



As only a very slight aside: I watched a bit of the Bee Gees documentary the other night – god, what a bunch of pretentious, self-satisfied twocks (and they deeply remind me of Cliff Richard, which isn't particularly in their favour). But I really do like some of their records.

Just out of interest - just how many "tunes" are there in Les Miserable ?



I know I was a bit disappointed when I bought the double CD of the original cast recording only to find that most of the songs were sung to the same four or five tunes so once you'd heard the four or five of them that got played on radio then you'd basically heard the whole show.

See!!!!!



It's not just me!!!!!

That's pretty much my take on it, though I do enjoy a bit of musical theatre now and then. A junior school production of Joseph was my first break into music - I was 'spotted' and asked along to a local music school. I played in various orchestras and brass bands and toured the USA, Canada, some of Europe and much of the UK playing festivals and competitions. I still play various instruments and compose stuff for my own entertainment - from classical to heavy metal.



Webber has composed some dross, but also some absolute epics. So have most composers and musicians - every band has album fillers, every composer has a few 'lesser' numbers. To call him 'not credible' is frankly ridiculous. He has nothing to prove. He has a remarkable talent to engage audiences, move them and bring them back again and again to his productions. It may be a more 'popular' form of musical theatre but that's down to personal taste.



R&H and some of the names on this thread were indeed at the top of the field though despite their classics I can take or leave much of their work. Much of it just doesn't engage me, though I can appreciate its quality and how it works with the wider production. If I'm honest some of it seems to belong to a bygone era and hasn't aged well. That's just down to my own taste, with my roots firmly entrenched elsewhere.



On a serious note, I'd happily travel back in time and shoot them both for The Sound of Music.



Someone posted 'there's a light at the end of the tunnel' on the 'good management' thread. The first thing popped into my head was a song from Starlight Express and I've only seen that once, around 1986.

Nah, I'd let them live simply for letting Sinatra record "This nearly was mine" from South Pacific, a wonderfully under-played, subdued, recording in which music and vocal are seemingly sung to different tempos but merge together sublimely - have a listen on Spotify, but pick Sinatra/Nelson Riddle's version.

We must be back to snobbery then!









Seriously, can you say in musical terms why [iDon't Cry For Me Argentina[/i is inferior to, say, [iYou'll Never Walk Alone[/i? Or how [iMusic Of The Night[/i is poorer than [iYounger Than Springtime[/i?

Again, that's a criticism that might be levelled at any number of musicians or composers. Having played a few Mozart piano sonatas in my time, it's staggering how many times he reuses certain devices in different pieces. And, in more contemporary genres, can anyone truly say that Oasis' stuff doesn't all sound a bit 'samey'?

I think that [iDon't Cry For Me Argentina[/i is one of the best things that LW has written. I think it stands up against a great many songs by a great many other composers. I think it has complexity musically and is good lyrically. It's probably fair to say it's now a 'standard' and be can sung on its own and even in stylistically different ways. Given all that, it's probably fair to say that it's on a par with [iYou'll Never Walk Alone[/i.



But then I have never said that LW has never written a decent song. However, my initial point remains: there's a top song there – but where are the other songs, from the same show, that are even close in quality and memorability?



A good popular show has to be more than one song. Okay, one song might become more famous than any other, but you need more than one good song in that show.



Which takes us back to [iLes Mis[/i: a very lengthy show (as I remember it), with three memorable songs (at a pinch) and a lot of the rest that sort of blurs together.



Two pars back, I mentioned "popular" – and it was for a reason. I haven't invoked Stephen Sondheim in this discussion until now precisely because I was sticking with 'popular', as opposed to Sondheim's oeuvre, which has largely* not been aimed at the widest, most 'popular' audience, and does other things.



If you're going to write a show where you're not producing a series of striking, memorable numbers, then there has to be something else. With Sondheim, it's things like more philosophically-inclined plots and music that is also more complex. In [iA Little Night Music[/i, for instance, the entire show is written in waltz time to echo the period in which it's set. It's never boring though, as Sondheim has the ability to create enormous variety within the limits he's set himself.



His lyrics can be remarkable too – sometimes, his rhyming could leave even WS Gilbert in the shade.



When Sondheim does thru-sung, he's good enough to make it work (he doesn't use it all the time, anyway).



But as I said, Sondheim is not a popular composer in the usual understanding of what that means.



But for a really good popular composer of musicals, there has to be more than one good (or even great) song per show.



As for [iMusic Of The Night[/i – I think it's overblown wannabe-opera tosh.



And if you're going to carry that off successfully, you need to be Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé.











* [iFollies[/i and [iA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum[/i are the exceptions, I think: the former because it's a pastiche/homage to an earlier period of popular shows and the latter, because it's a pretty broad comedy (a sort of a musical [iUp Pompeii[/i).

Cheers, enjoyed that.



Perhaps just a little mild torture for Sound of Music then.

On This Night Of A Thousand Stars and Another Suitcase In Another Hall are both reasonably close, I'd say.











But I think a lot of his shows do have a number of 'good' songs in them. Certainly as many as other composers in the same genre. And most shows only have one 'great' number in them. Taking Joseph (it's the one I know best) as an example, it might not have loads of songs that have become standards in their own right, but I think all the songs work well in the context of the production and none are unpleasant to listen to. Surely the job of a composer in musical theatre is to compose songs that work well in the show first and foremost. Anything else is a bonus.

OK Minty, just to save me the trouble, cos I can't be bothered and this is your bag anyway...........

Since this seems to be key to what makes someone great in an objective way, what do the 'experts' say about Lloyd Webber?

:1oamx624



To borrow from Wikipedia:



"Lloyd Webber has been accused of plagiarism in his works. His biographer, John Snelson, has acknowledged the strong similarity between the opening melody of the slow movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and the Jesus Christ Superstar song "I Don't Know How to Love Him", but opines that Webber



In interviews promoting Amused to Death, Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, claimed that Lloyd Webber had plagiarised short chromatic riffs from the 1971 song "Echoes" for sections of The Phantom of the Opera, released in 1986; nevertheless, he decided not to file a lawsuit regarding the matter.



The songwriter Ray Repp made a similar claim about the same song, but insisted that Lloyd Webber stole the idea from him. Unlike Roger Waters, Ray Repp did decide to file a lawsuit, but the court eventually ruled in Lloyd Webber's favour.



Rick Wakeman, on his Grumpy Old Rockstar tour of 2008, accused Lloyd Webber of borrowing the main riff for the Phantom of the Opera tune from a section of his 1977 work "Judas Iscariot" from the album Criminal Record.



Lloyd Webber has also been accused of plagiarising Puccini, most notably in Requiem and The Phantom of the Opera. In the Program Guide for the San Francisco Opera's performance (2009–2010 season) of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West, on page 42, it states: "The climactic phrase in Dick Johnson'a aria, "Quello che taceta," bears a strong resemblance to a similar phrase in the Phantom's song, "Music of the Night," in Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera.



Following the musical's success, the Puccini estate filed suit against Lloyd Webber accusing him of plagiarism and the suit was settled out of court.



Lloyd Webber has also been accused of plagiarism by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who described him as "yet to think up a single note; in fact, the poor guy's never invented one note by himself."

[url=http://www.kenlyen.com/gpage38.htmlA bit dense but interesting.[/url

A nice balanced response.



To borrow from his own site and Wiki:

1 Oscar (Best Original Song) + 2 nominations

1 Golden Globe (Best Original Song) + 1 nomination

7 Tony awards

7 Laurence Olivier awards

3 Grammy awards

14 Ivor Novello awards

The Triple Play award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers

American Songwriters’ Hall of Fame

Praemium Imperiale award for music 1995

Richard Rodgers award for Excellence in Musical Theatre 1996

London Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical 2000 (I'm assuming Minty didn't vote for him)



2 International Emmy Awards

Knighted in 1992 for services to the theatre throughout the world.

Early in 1998, Andrew was honoured with Variety’s first British Entertainment Personality Of The Year Award.

Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for live theatre (1993)

Kennedy Honors 2006

Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service 2008

1988 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations for The Phantom of the Opera



Cats, together with Starlight Express and Jesus Christ Superstar, gave Andrew the three longest-running musicals in British theatre history. Andrew is also the first person to have a trio of musicals running in London and New York.



Many of those awards are voted for and decided on by experts in the same field. Not bad for a non-credible plagiarist.

I thought that too. It's almost as if Minty just picked the bit that supported her view!

Nope. Although I used to be a member.









Well he's settled 'out of court' for such accusations of plagiarism ...

Actually, I was thing about this and realised that the date of that award was shortly after I had resigned form the organisation in question, since I'd moved to a job that did not involve reviewing.



And look what happened ...

Yes, I realised that he was accused of plagiarism and I wouldn't know if he deliberately copied extracts of previous works or not.



I would say that most musical style is derivative.

Musicians are a product in the main of the accumulated wealth of their experience with others people's music.

Just as you are the product of your accumulated experiences, granted not in music especially, but to some degree.

So just who is original?



It is also possible to reproduce music based on something you have heard before quite accidentally with no intention to plagiarise.

Obviously, if this is happening often, you have to wonder about the integrity of the composer.



Sometimes it is quite deliberate that one might chose a piece of music as the basis to compose another of your own. I don't think that is uncommon or for that matter necessarily plagiarism. You might use the structure as a base.



Is it the question of his originality then that makes you doubt his worth?

The only comment I have about Webber is that when I was 11 'ish we did a production of Jesus Christ Superstar at my school (not long after it was written I guess). Our school couldn't afford to pay the large chunk of cash required to be allowed to perform all the music so we had to read out 70% of the musical and act it without music. We were only allowed to perform the clearly defined "songs" with the music. It was excrutiating.

Money raised went to the school fund, Webber's production company made no exceptions. The Lord was getting his cut.

If only there had been millions of other musicals your school could have chosen to put on.

Reminds me of Robert Palmers legal defence to charges that he had plagiarised "Some Guys Have All The Luck", not just the tune but the title too, he surmised that he must have heard the original tune when walking past an open window somewhere





Paul McCartney too is said to have played the tune "Yesterday" to several people before recording it as he had woken up one morning with the tune in his head and was convinced that it wasn't his tune but one that he must have overheard.



And I'll throw my professional guitarist cousin into the mix as he was actually sued for plagiarism after he wrote and recorded one of those novelty football songs for Leeds Utd (when they had a football team), had a deal with the club, had some of the team in the chorus, was all set to sell at least 40 thousand copies to the supporters when someone in Manchester claimed that it was his chorus, it went to a pre-trial hearing and he had to pay for a professor of music from Manchester to testify that the sequence of notes in the chorus were not similar enough to be plagiarised - by the time the legal case was conceeded (to him) he'd lost the window of opportunity to release the record and it was dropped.



I helped him produce 70 demo tapes of his single one night, it was cr@p, the world was saved from earache.

It can happen though, even though a defence like that might look dodgy.

He should have perhaps have said that it came from his subconscious based on something he may have heard.

And who's to say it didn't?

Mind you the title? That's harder to explain.