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by goodness 5978 days ago
"...was the product of intense creative labor"

I don't mean to downplay the amount of work that goes in to writing a song, but this seems a bit over the top. Short little melodies like this are trivial to write. My pre-school age children come up with these all the time.

The tune of Happy Birthday doesn't seem particularly catchy to me. We've just heard it repeated so many times.
1 comments
anamax 5978 days ago
> I don't mean to downplay the amount of work that goes in to writing a song, but this seems a bit over the top. Short little melodies like this are trivial to write. My pre-school age children come up with these all the time.

> The tune of Happy Birthday doesn't seem particularly catchy to me. We've just heard it repeated so many times.

Read the story. The authors actually did a lot of work on Happy Birthday. (They had a couple of conflicting goals and did a lot of testing.)

While short little melodies are trivial to write, HB isn't just any short little melody. Disagree? Come up with a few that work as well. Riches await.

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goodness 5978 days ago
I read the story. It claims to be "a product of a highly focused, laborious effort to write a song that was extremely simple to sing yet musically interesting and emotionally expressive, undertaken by a composer and an educator who happened to be sisters."

I still don't really buy that it was "laborious effort." And I don't think the song is popular because of some fantastic musical merits. If the song was still "good morning to all" then it would be just another song. The only reason it has any monetary value is because it became associated with birthdays.

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anamax 5977 days ago
> I still don't really buy that it was "laborious effort."

Having read accounts of said effort, I wonder what you think qualifies as laborious. They did days of testing with groups of kids.

> And I don't think the song is popular because of some fantastic musical merits.

And no one said that it has fantastic musical merits. Instead, they say that it has fantastic kid music merits.

That's a hard market to crack. Lots of people try to write Barney, but few actually pull it off.

There are lots of songs that could have become the standard. That one did, by design and labor.

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