[Finale] composer, etc.

[Linda Worsley]

Ya know, folks... this whole thing is completely out of hand. But I've loved the fray, learned a lot (as usual with these OT battles), and enjoyed it.

However, lest I be misunderstood... my objection to calling certain "creators" of "music" "composers" was not meant to leave out all the truly creative, skilled, and productive people. Not even Stevie Wonder. The people that I want drummed out of the composer corps are:

1) amateurs who don't read or write music, and have zero knowledge about how it's put together, written or not, but who can afford to noodle things into synthesizers and create "symphonies" and "songs" and "overtures" and blah blah... and then call them selves "composers". (A recent poster on another list is one of those noodlers... he knows NOTHING about music except what he likes to noodle on his synthesizers, and he has enough money to hire people to sort it out, write it down, copy the parts, and get orchestras like the LSO to play it. And it's awful stuff. His screen name includes "symphonycomposer". Makes me want to howl at the moon.)

2) professionals who know how to hum the tune or noodle or improvise on guitar or one finger (or even one finger and a few chords) and hum and noodle into the ear of someone who DOES know how to turn it into music... and then call themselves "composers". (someone like Billie Holiday who was a great performer, but probably could barely write her name much less a song, but who came up with, for example, "God Bless the Child" etc., and hummed bits of it into the ear of pianist Arthur Herzog, who then made a song of it..)

3) songwriters who aren't even songwriters... the most heinous example being the publisher mentioned in an earlier post, one Irving Mills, who put his name on the work of the likes of Duke Ellington JUST TO COLLECT THE ROYALTIES... but having no part whatsoever in the creation of the music, arrangement, anything. It was a total scam, and one he insisted upon: "put my name on it or I won't publish it". Arggghh.

4) The improvisors, even the really good ones, who are not composers in my book, but are often wonderful, even stupendous, performers. It's not putting them down to say they are not composers, it's simply defining the term.

In spite of my rigid exclusion of all the above, and my preference to call songwriters "songwriters" rather than composers, I can accept anyone with some real musical skill, experience, training (whatever that might be) that allows them to either write or participate in the writing of music, in any style, for any medium, that can be replicated by others.

Don't get steamed and say I am making a "quality" judgement... Not true. I really can't stand most of the music of, among others, Carl Maria von Weber, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Philip Glass, LeRoy Anderson, or John Taverner (the one alive now, not the ancient one) but I sure consider all of them "composers."

But fire away... this has been more fun than actually working.

Linda Worsley






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