We return, after much slack!
This topic should really have gone to the Professor, as he's much more musically inclined than I am. I'll give it a shot anyway.
So, melody. Melody is a sequence of notes that are "tuneful" - whatever that means. In my mind, they sound good in the particular order that they're arranged in. Within a melody are musical "phrases", and something these phrases sound (I guess to the more musically inclined) like a question and corresponding answer.
According to the ID (and I disagree with their wording here), melodies were, and still are, often "shared" among composers, especially in the middle Ages. In particular, it cites L'homme_armé as a frequently shared melody. To me, "sharing" is a bit of a misnomer - someone obviously came up with this melody first, and many other borrowed it for their own compositions.
In modern day music, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is an oft-shared melody, according to the ID. However, in further reading the Wikipedia article (and we all know that Wikipedia is never wrong!), Twinkle is actually a poem put to an older melody, "Ah! vous dirais-je, Maman" that was written some 40 years before the poem.
An interesting English translation of one of the original French versions:
Oh! Shall I tell you, Mommy
What is tormenting me?
Daddy wants me to reason
Like a grown-up person,
Me, I say that sweets
Are worth more than reasoning
Not quite the happy-go-lucky poem about stars that we're used to!
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