The Tremeloes' "Hello World"

Last month, I wrote about a riff that's in both the Moody Blues' "So Deep within You" from On the Threshold of a Dream and Rod Argent and Chris White's "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," which was recorded after the Zombies broke up.  At the time, I'd thought I knew an-other song that had a similar-sounding part, but I couldn't identify it.  Recently though, I listened to an anthology of the Tremeloes, and I discovered that I'd been thinking of the beginning of "Hello World."

The phrase in "Hello World" is longer than those in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," and it repeats more frequently.  The song starts with it played four and a half times.

In "Hello World," it starts on a different pitch relative to the key than in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)," but the intervals are the same in all three (and the pitches of the first five notes are the same between "Hello World" and "So Deep within You").

(click the image to enlarge it)

(standard disclaimer that the notation may be wrong because I did it myself)

Unlike the other two, the notes in that phrase in "Hello World" are picked individually where the second of each pair of eighth notes are hammer-ons in "So Deep within You" and "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)."

According to the liner notes in my Tremeloes collection (Silence Is Golden: The Very Best of the Tremeloes), "Hello World" was issued as a single in 1969.  On the Threshold of a Dream - the album on which "So Deep within You" appears - was also released in 1969 (specifically, April).  Apparently "So Deep within You" was the B-side to the "Never Comes the Day" single, released the same month.  According to the liner notes for Into the Afterlife, "Telescope (Mr. Galileo)" was recorded in March 1968, although it wasn't released until Into the Afterlife in 2007.

So I have even fewer answers than I did when I wrote my original post.  Now I have three songs that were all recorded and/or released within about a year and that all share the same phrase.

The Shangri-Las' "Remember (Walking in the Sand)"

Last month, I listened to a compilation album of the Shangri-Las, and I became really interested in "Remember (Walking in the Sand)."  It has some great features, and the more I looked into it, the more I found.

The first thing I noticed was the bass parts during the "(Remember) Walking in the sand..." section:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(standard disclaimer that the notation may be wrong because I did it myself)

I should note that I combined the electric bass part and the bass register of the piano part in the notation.  After two eighth notes spanning a fourth (A to D) in the bass register of the piano, the electric bass echoes that fourth in quarter notes.  Musically, there's a portrayal of memory.  There's the initial event (the fourth on piano), and then that event is revisited but - because of the unreliable nature of memory - it's slightly different.  It's still the interval of a fourth, but it's played on a different instrument and the note values are longer, almost as if that memory is being dwelt upon rather than hurriedly passed over.

In figuring out how to play the bass part (so that I could write about what was happening in that section), I discovered that during the verses, it's has a downward trend:

This repeats throughout the verse, but I don't know how to add repeat signs (the program I use is actually meant to create MIDI files, not notation, but it works well enough for that purpose).

Between that descent and the key (D minor), the sadness in the lyrics ("Seems like the other day / My baby went away," "He said that we were through / He found somebody new") is emphasized.

About a month after I realized those two things about the bass part, I realized that those two sections are in different time signatures.  The verses are in 3/4, and the choruses are in 4/4.  There's a musical distinction between the events that the singer/speaker is currently relating and the events that she's remembering.

The Shirelles - Greatest Hits

Over the last month or so, I've been listening to a Greatest Hits album by the Shirelles fairly regularly, and I found some interesting things in a number of the songs, mostly just interesting melismas.  Coincidentally, it was a year ago to-day that I first listened to the album.

"Tonight's the Night"

There are some nice features with melismas in the bridge here.  The "so"s in both "I might love you so much" and "I may want you so much" have melismas, as if to emphasize how much, and the "heart" in "You may break my heart" has three syllables instead of the usual one, portraying the fragmented nature that the heart would have if it were broken.

"Baby It's You"

Similar to the "heart" in "Tonight's the Night," there's a melisma on "apart" in the second line -  "It’s not the way you kiss that tears me apart."

"Everybody Loves a Lover"

The last two "fell"s in the lead vocals have melismas and the later syllables have lower pitches than the first ones, so as the word is sung, it becomes lower.  The word itself is falling as the speaker/singer explains how she fell in love.

"Foolish Little Girl"

I think ever since the first time I listened to this, the opening sounded vaguely familiar.  It wasn't until about a month ago that I placed it; the first line ("You broke his heart and made him cry") is quite similar to the first line in "Do You Love Me" ("You broke my heart / 'Cause I couldn't dance").  Both songs also have the same contrast in instrumentation.  That first section is quieter with fewer instruments, but then more instruments join in and the song becomes louder.

I should note that I actually don't own the Contour's version of "Do You Love Me."  I'm writing based on the Tremeloes' version, which I think is a pretty faithful cover.

Grieg: From Holberg's Time, Op. 40

Last month, I listened to Grieg's Op. 40 a few times, both the orchestrated version and the solo piano version.  As the title page notes, From Holberg's Time was purposely written in an older style ("im alten Style"):

The Holberg in the title is Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754), a Norwegian man of letters.

While listening to the piano version, I noticed a phrase in the first movement:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(notation found here)

When I heard this it sounded familiar to me, although I had to look up the notation to figure out what was going on and why it sounded familiar.  Starting in the forty-ninth measure, the bass part starts descending, but after every two notes, it alternates octaves and repeats the last note from the previous pair.  Or, at least, it alternates octaves to some degree, since the notes are also doubled in octaves.  (This is in the orchestrated version too, although the notes aren't doubled by octaves.)

This sounded familiar because this same type of figure is in the continuo parts of two Bach works that I looked into recently, Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4) and the Third Orchestral Suite in D major (BWV 1068).

(notation found here [BWV 4] and here [BWV 1068])

For the past year and a half (I finished it yester-day), I'd been reading a book of Edvard Grieg's letters (Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends, Benestad and Halverson, eds.), and I recently read a letter he wrote to August Winding on 4 February 1875 saying that

recently in St. Thomas Church [in Leipzig] I heard the first concert by a Bach Association under the leadership of Volkland, von Holstein and Spitta (the author of an excellent book on Bach).  The concert included three cantatas by Bach that had not been performed publicly before.  I have never heard anything so beautiful by Bach; they are marvelous, great, profound, childlike and fervent.

I'm not sure if Christ lag in Todes Banden is one of the cantatas that Grieg heard, but that letter at least illustrates that Grieg was fairly familiar with Bach's works.

From Holberg's Time is from 1884, almost ten years after Grieg heard those Bach cantatas in Leipzig.  So between Grieg's documented familiarity with Bach's works and the close historical time period between Holberg (1684-1754) and Bach (1685-1750), it seems like Grieg might have taken that particular phrase from Bach's suite and/or cantata and used it to evoke that particular time period in his own work.