In my previous post, I mentioned that I've long been naturally drawn to tune connections. Back in "The Aughts," when the blog was young, I wrote a series of what I called "Tune Theft" posts lightheartedly using the term "theft" to describe instances in which a given melody seemed to borrow quite a bit from a previous melody. As so often on the blog, I was interested in how it is that a given set of notes can carry a specific identity which can nonetheless be repurposed to create something quite different, much as we just saw with four notes from "Swing low, sweet chariot." You may find the original list, mostly from 2007 with some other additions grafted in, here.
Although some of these (such as John Williams altering a Richard Strauss tune for the Superman love song) are pretty oft-cited connections, a lot of them are not so often discussed, and some are just plain odd, like my dear Mother always insisting that the main theme from the Beethoven violin concerto sounds like "Onward, Christian Soldiers." These range from almost straight-out steals - the radiant "Porgi, amor" which the Countess sings in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro begins almost exactly like an orchestral passage from a recitative by Gazzaniga (?)! - to extremely obscure connections.
The two most obscure connections I've added are:
How holdover bassoon notes (a B) in very different works by Mendelssohn and Copland begin in strikingly similar fashion. There is admittedly no real tune connection here.
How the opening two chords from a ubiquitous Minecraft theme once linked my brain to the opening of a partsong (in the same key) by Stanford. There is admittedly barely any connection here.
Note that, although I've made dozens of musical mashups, a mashup is not necessarily based on a tune connection. In fact, many of my mashups are based on two tunes which are truly unrelated except by some external link (such as a pun). See for example: Claire Elise and The Luigi Rag. So the purpose of this list is to document when I've discussed melodies which have some DNA in common. I arbitrarily decided not to include the multiple tunes found in this little 5-3-2-1 collection or the many, many "How Dry I Am" tunes Bernstein connects for us here.
To celebrate the updating of this list (for which each title will take you to the relevant blog post), I'm adding one other connection I assumed I'd written about, but I guess I hadn't. Franz Liszt is well-known for his use of thematic transformation, a particularly strong unifying device in his tone-poem Les Préludesin which just about every theme is generated from the same motive. But the love theme below has pretty much always reminded me of something otherwise unrelated (I think):
The connection is pretty easy to see, I think, but you may hear it here:
[By the way, it turns out "For he's a jolly good fellow" has a longer history than I would have guessed, going back to early 18th century France, but I doubt Liszt anticipated the thematic transformation at the end of that video.]
So, we shall add this Liszt to the list below. The Liszt will also have a permanent home over here on the new Tune Table blog page. Hopefully, I'll keep it updated as this becomes another interesting way of indexing some of what has gone on here these past 18.5 years.
LYRIC POET: Are we embarking on a study of the meaning of meaning? YOUNGER BROTHER: I sure hope not. (from Leonard Bernstein's The Joy of Music)
NOTE: There are more than 550 possible outcomes.
About Me
MICHAEL MONROE
I'm a pianist and college music professor in the Boston area. This is not me. Neither is this. Curiously, these most Googleable Michael Monroe's are each musicians. This IS me.
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