Yesterday I went to hear my daughter sing in the Hart House Chorus, which was lovely. The programme informed us that the choir would be performing Joseph Haydn's Mass followed by Ludwig Van Beethoven's Mass, and the Latin Mass was printed beside its English translation, but it wasn't until the Beethoven began that it dawned on me that both composers were setting the same words to their own music.
I started thinking about how often that happens, and although some quick Google research yielded several instances of more modern artists who have created a drastically different arrangement of one of their (or someone else's) songs, they tend not to vary so much that you would call it a different piece.
I remember that years ago an ad agency here in Toronto wanted to create a new TV spot for Pepsi in which a well-known band sang a song they had written using lyrics provided by the agency. Several bands were contacted to write their version of the song. The Kings participated in this, and wrote a pretty good tune, but the agency ultimately went with a version created by Rough Trade instead. (The spot didn't air for very long because it featured imagery of people completely wrapped in bandages, and Nash the Slash, who had not been consulted, forced them to cease-and-desist)
It makes me wonder why this doesn't happen more often. There are several examples of different lyrics being written for the same melody, (some even unintentionally actionable) but it seems to be almost unheard of the other way around. Maybe the following story partially explains why.
A friend of mine wrote a musical setting for Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" which was beautiful, but led me to wonder about the legalities of using existing poetic works that hadn't yet passed into the public domain. Some research led me to the sad story of noted choral composer Eric Whitacre, who had also written a lovely setting for the same poem, but ultimately learned that Frost's estate wouldn't allow him to use it. Whitacre was forced to commission a completely new lyric, "Sleep," that followed the same rhyme and scan as the original from his friend and longtime collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri. The result is fantastic, and although you can imagine the original poem being sung against this melody, Silvestri has created a different lyric (which Whitacre publicly professes to prefer) that perfectly captures the spirit of the music without referring to Frost's imagery at all. Watch how delighted Whitacre is to conduct this:
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