A few years ago I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for the first time & was surprised when I heard a musical theme that I had heard on the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. A little internet research revealed that Michael Kamen was the composer for both productions.
Earlier this evening, the 1956 Clark Gable movie, The King and Four Queens, was on TV & in several scenes I heard the melody of the theme music from the 70s miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. I immediately hit the internet & found that Alex North was the composer in both cases.
Thomas Newman’s songs for American Beauty have been reused, sampled from, and remixed several times for both movies and TV. The only one I can think of off the top of my head though is House MD. But I hear them often.
I once saw the musical, Martin Guerre, which is by the same composer as did Les Miserables. I don’t think there was an original song in all of Martin Guerre, every one was just a a Les Mis song played at a different tempo.
Not an orchestral composer, but… Louis Jordan used the same tune for “Beware Brother Beware,” “Slender, Tender and Tall” and “All For the Love of Lil.” Probably a few others as well.
I was surprised to hear (today, as a matter of fact) how many melody segments from the music from various Looney Toons cartoons that Franz Liszt ripped off to write his 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody.
I really liked the music for “Last of the Mohicans,” so I was happy to hear it again the next year in “Cliffhanger,” and to a lesser extent in several other movies scored by Trevor Jones.
A few months back I watched the first season of Gravity Falls, since reddit was getting really hyped with the show. I quite enjoyed the intro music, so I searched youtube for more stuff by the composer. Apparently, the author Brad Breeck self-stole the theme from a previous score by him, a song named “Made Me Realize”, which is so obviously the same music that it’s more popularly known as an extended version of the first.
And yet he claims that both songs are completely unrelated. You be the judge.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a classical composer best know for his film scores, used themes from some of his best-known scores (including “Anthony Adverse” and “The Prince and the Pauper”) in his violin concerto.
And his cello concerto was based on music he first wrote for the 1946 film Deception.
Actually, it’s fairly frequent.
Bach very often took material from several works to write new ones The Christmas Oratorio is based on several of his secular cantatas for instance.
When Prokofiev rewrote his cello concerto as the Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra, he re-used a lot of the former’s material. But these works have different opus numbers suggesting that he viewed them as separate pieces. Moreover, both works contain a dramatic four-note motif that is also found in his ballet Romeo and Juliet.
Dutilleux refused to have his ballet Le Loup played as a concert piece or to write an orchestral suite based on it but incorporated some snippets from it in Les Citations 40 years later.
