Should I ever happen to end up running a highly-lucrative online songwriting course, I would probably start with this video. In fact, it would make the perfect introductory exercise:
Objective #1 - write a hit song using two fingers and your nan's miniature Casio keyboard (10 points).
Jarvis Cocker is best known as the lead singer/songwriter of the band Pulp who, in turn, are best known for the hit song "Common People". And, although he's written many more great songs, it's probably the one song for which he'll be remembered. Still, as he himself noted, Black Lace had "Agadoo", so it could be worse.
By his own admission, he is not a sophisticated musician and this video, where he explains how he first picked out the basics of "Common People" on a miniature keyboard, is a good reminder that songwriting is a remarkably democratic thing. You don't need an alphabet of qualifications after your name to have a go or, even, to do it well.
This is also true of musicals.
We rightly eulogise the sophisticated and highly-educated musicians like Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. All were accomplished musicians with an unusual capacity for ingesting and employing an array of musical influences and styles. As talents, they were exceptional. But what about the common people?
Well, musicals are also the domain of Irving Berlin, who could only play the piano on the black notes; Bob Merrill, who composed his songs on a toy xylophone; and Lionel Bart, who couldn't read or write music, and would instead hum his tunes to a pianist to get them transcribed.
So, you can be a sophisticated, world-renowned symphonic conductor-composer or you can play a toy xylophone and, whichever you are, it seems that you can end up writing a classic musical. That's astonishing, when you think about.
"I prefer simple songs to complicated songs. The simpler a song is, the better. You can have a couple of notes and that will suffice. Because, in a way, the less notes you use, it leaves more of a gap which you can imply other notes and stuff like that."
In the case of music, harmonics are literally that, where the sound waves of a single note produces faint echoes of (or "implies") other notes which, in turn, provides us with the basis of Western harmony.
In the case of songs, the "gap" is being filled by the lyric.
And, more broadly, in the case of musical theatre, the "gap" is not only being filled by the lyric but all the other theatrical/dramatic considerations.
I wonder if this is a different way of thinking about musical theatre writing; that it is as much to do with what you leave out as what you put in. To put it another way, perhaps musical theatre writers are more sketchers than painters. That is, they draw the outlines but leave gaps for the colour to be added. An inherent part of the job is to allow space and room for others.
And, perhaps, that's why even the non-credentialed composer and the simple songwriter can, from time to time, make a real go of it.
As Jarvis says:
"Sing along with the Common People
And it might just get you through"
