Allow me to direct you to this forum:
http://www.soundsonline-forums.com/showthread.php?t=3951A number of people are talking about the composition work of James Horner (the composer of The Land Before Time's original music). An interesting comment was made by one of their members:
"His older material was less self referential and more plagiaristic of lesser known classical pieces like Prokofiev's 40th Anniversary Cantata (for Red Heat), Bartok's Wooden Prince (for The Land BEfore Time), Charles Ives' Unanswered Question (wolfen), Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (Star Trek 3), Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky (Enemies at the Gate), John Adams' Grand Pianola Music (Sneakers, Beautiful Mind, Bicentennial Man), Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible (Glory), Schumann's 3rd Symphony (Willow), and sadly I could keep going on.....
It's sad because I think Horner is a skilled musician who just happens to be bereft of any original music ideas. He's a great dramatist though and scores like Braveheart, Rocketeer, Spitfire Grill, Field of Dreams, and such all reflect this. I just wish he wouldn't goshdarn rip so many other composers off....."
Where it states that "The Land Before Time" was, at least in part, a ripoff of Bela Bartok's "The Wooden Prince" is where I want to draw our attention to. I have found some audio clips from "The Wooden Prince" to test this for myself. They can be found Here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000001GG...v=glance&n=5174Check out the demos of the various parts of "The Wooden Prince". The only two I see that could potentially be argued as similar to the LBT score have to be the intro and the First Dance (tracks 4 and 5), at least according to my ears. Perhaps if I were listen to the entire piece of music (as opposed to the 60 second clips), my mind would change, but I was unsuccessful at finding even MIDI files of the entire piece.
Track 4 mainly reminds me of "The Great Migration" (the opening theme)
Track 5 mainly reminds me of what I shall call Ducky's theme (the musical theme that plays when Ducky is first seen hatching).
These ties are rather vague, however.
It looks to me like there may be a hint of truth to the arguement that Horner plagerizes classical composers, but I sincerely believe that the music fans on that forum are reading between the lines just a bit too much. With the amount of music available in the world, it is very possible to accidently "plagerize" an existing work without even knowing. Their arguements on the forum show a large number of examples where Horner has done something similar. I refuse to say that he plagarized any work, however small amounts of borrowing very likely took place. Where does one draw the line between borrowing and plagarizing?
Any thoughts?