Quote:
Originally Posted by
buttmunker 
Not to be a jerk or anything...but did Michael Jackson really write the
music to his songs? By "music," I mean the musical instruments. I am confident Michael could write the lyrics, but since I never saw him playing a musical instrument, I wonder if someone else wrote the music to his songs, and didn't receive credit.
I am sure I heard that this happens a lot in music, depending on what juice the performer has. For example, The Beatles music. George Harrison gets credit for
"Within You/Without You", but no way could he know how to write indian music! He gets full credit because he is George Harrison.
That the case with Michael? Did he write the music behind
"Billie Jean?"
Do you know for certain that George Harrison could not write indian-based music?
What if he did his research first?
As for Jackson, playing an instrument on stage or not has no bearing on a person's abilities to compose music.
Being a soundtrack listener, I know that there are some composers who write the music, then pass it to an orchestrator / arranger who will assign the lines of music to specific instruments to play. While that in itself is an art form just like composing is, that doesn't take away from the composers themselves. Since there are a variety of reasons for that to happen, ability is probably at the bottom of the list for those possible reasons.
Writing in certain styles, like indian music or something specific like that would be on that list of reasons for having someone else turn the written music into what you hear in the end product, probably to help make it as authentic as possible while the idea itself is still from the composer/songwriter, be it Jackson, Harrison or anyone else.
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