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TMP Soundtrack - Homage or plagiarism?

The Flyover music sounds vaguely like that piece, but not enough to be an homage and certainly not plagiarism.
 
You can't claim ownership of an ostinato. And that's a very simple, basic ostinato, one that Goldsmith chose for V'Ger specifically because of its simplicity (he wanted to represent the cold, mathematical precision of the entity). I'm sure it can be found in some form in hundreds of different pieces of music. For instance, an inverted version of it is the basis of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo theme. And take a random sampling of Philip Glass's body of work and you'll hear plenty of identical or similar ostinati.
 
Christopher said:
You can't claim ownership of an ostinato. And that's a very simple, basic ostinato, one that Goldsmith chose for V'Ger specifically because of its simplicity (he wanted to represent the cold, mathematical precision of the entity). I'm sure it can be found in some form in hundreds of different pieces of music. For instance, an inverted version of it is the basis of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo theme. And take a random sampling of Philip Glass's body of work and you'll hear plenty of identical or similar ostinati.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that word, Christopher! So an ostinato is to a melody what an asterism is to a constellation?
 
Err, no, an ostinato is basically the "beat" underlying a melody, the repeating pattern that the melody is played on top of. It's usually the pattern that you hear for a few bars at the beginning of a piece of music and then continues playing underneath ("ostinato" basically means "persistent") once the main melody kicks in. For instance, in the Indiana Jones theme, that "bum, bum, bum-badalada, bum, bum, bum-badalada" playing on the strings at a constant pitch is the ostinato. In rock music, the ostinato is usually a pattern of drumbeats, although it can be other things like a repeating piano chord (in a lot of '50s rock). On a synthesizer, a "pad" (a programmed drumbeat or other repeating sound that sets the rhythm) is essentially an ostinato.

Maybe I'm stretching the terminology a bit to call this particular 6-note melody an ostinato in the V'Ger theme or the Vertigo theme, because it's more of a main melody in both cases. But it evidently played the role of an ostinato in that Chicago song. I didn't listen to more than the initial seconds of the clip, but I doubt the vocal line was sung to that melody.
 
Christopher said:
Maybe I'm stretching the terminology a bit to call this particular 6-note melody an ostinato in the V'Ger theme or the Vertigo theme, because it's more of a main melody in both cases.
Click to expand...

It makes perfect sense though that 6 notes were used for Vejur, doesn't it?

Neil
 
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