How to write the ultimate cover version

These seven lessons from history show how composers of all eras have used other people's music to achieve startlingly original results.

Why does the song from the most recent John Lewis advert make some of us feel so very, very festive? One Day I’ll Fly Away (covered here by Vaults) isn’t exactly a Christmas song.

Perhaps it’s because the song’s central hook (the “Some day I’ll flyyyyyy away” tune) is shared with a perennial festive favourite: Waltz of the Flowers from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

The practice of “borrowing” elements from other composers’ work was commonplace in the past.

Take Mozart, for example – yes, THE Mozart. One of his most famous works, his Requiem, contains elements downright pilfered from Handel’s Messiah – a piece that he was intimately familiar with, having made a transcription two years previously.

Composers in the past may have been able to borrow bits of each other’s music without fear of repercussion, but several high profile court cases in recent years have shown that it’s not something that musicians can hope to get away with now.

Sergei Rachmaninov's estate was unimpressed by Eric Carmen's use of the composer's music without permission

And don’t assume that just because a piece of music is “classical” it’s OK to cover it without permission. In 1975, Eric Carmen borrowed material from the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 for his power ballad All By Myself.

Classy, yes – but he made the mistake of assuming the music was out of copyright. It wasn’t, and Carmen had to pay Rachmaninov’s estate a percentage of royalties. Oops.

3. Make a catchier version of the original

Ask a group of people about their favourite cover versions and you’ll probably be met with a barrage of hits that you may not even have realised were covers in the first place.

Who sang And I Will Always Love You? For most people, it’s indisputably Whitney Houston – despite the fact that the song was originally written and performed by Dolly Parton nearly 20 years earlier.

Ditto Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen), Mark Ronson’s Valerie (The Zutons), Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now (Tommy Kames and the Shondells) and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Robert Hazard).

In some ways, a really great cover effectively becomes the original.

4. Cover the original in a completely different style

A piece of music written in one era can become something different altogether when reworked in another. Take the song Die Moritat von Mackie Messer – a song from the Threepenny Opera written in 1928 by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by Berthold Brecht.

You might not recognise that song, but you almost certainly will know its cover. Ever since 1958, when Bobby Darin performed a swinging version in English, that tune has been better known as Mack the Knife.

More genre-bending covers include Der Erlkönig by Hope Lies Within (a hard rock cover of Franz Schubert’s 1815 song), and William Orbit’s Adagio for Strings, a 1995 dance remix of Samuel Barber’s 1936 piece for string orchestra.

Many composers, both now and in the past, have paid homage to their musical heroes by using their work to create completely new music. For some, it’s a practice that has helped make their names.

Mary J Blige and Sting's Grammy Award-winning duet Whenever I Say Your Name is based on JS Bach's Little Prelude in C Major

The 19th-century French composer Charles Gounod was a huge fan of JS Bach. He was especially inspired by Bach’s keyboard preludes from The Well-Tempered Clavier – so much so that he wrote a melody designed to be sung over the top of Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846. The result, Ave Maria, is arguably what Gounod is best remembered for now.

Other songs that go back to Bach for basics include Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale and Mary J Blige and Sting's 2004 duet Whenever I Say Your Name.

Religious and folk music traditions have proved a rich source of cover material for many musicians. When it comes to religion, one tune that comes round time and time again is Dies irae (Day of Wrath), a medieval Latin hymn that has been used in the Latin Requiem Mass since the 13th century.

Perennially associated with death, the tune has popped up in works as diverse as Verdi’s Requiem, Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and John Williams’s score for Star Wars.

When it comes to folk music – thought of by many as music of the people – the etiquette surrounding cover versions isn't quite as straighforward as you might think, as Eliza Carthy explains on The Listening Service.

Why go to the trouble of pinching music from your fellow composers when you can start closer to home? Composers throughout history have revisited and reworked their own music, whether to make an artistic point (like Joni Mitchell, who re-recorded A Case of You nearly 30 years after its original release) or to meet a deadline, as the Baroque composer Handel did throughout his career.

One of Handel’s most enduring and beautiful tunes is "Lascia ch'io pianga" from his 1711 opera Rinaldo – although you might also recognise it from late 1990s Harrods adverts. However, it was by no means a new tune, being based on a sarabande he originally wrote in 1705. He used it again in 1707 for an oratorio, before finally whacking it into Rinaldo with a new title and words in 1711. Now that’s what you call efficient.

Of course, every new performance of a piece is to some extent a reinterpretation, which raises the interesting philosophical question: isn't every performance a cover version of some kind?

The Listening Service’s exploration of the art of the cover version is available online and to download at the Radio 3 website.