Could this little ditty, famously used as a daytime soap theme song...
...have been copied from this Italian thriller score?
It's possible: the first tune, "Cotton's Dream", was included in the score for Bless the Beasts and Children, released in August 1971... four months after the release of Una Farfalla Con Le Ali Insanguinate (a.k.a. The Bloodstained Butterfly). Of course, both of these songs inherited their harmonic spine from "(They Long to Be) Close to You". Originally released as a stiffly-performed single in 1963, Bacharach & David's famous ballad is most commonly remembered by the Carpenters' 1970 iteration, with the piano skipping daintily between the suspended-second & major-seventh chords - a motif extremely similar to that employed by the two tunes above.
But really, the sus2-maj7/min7 vamp is just an easy-listening trope in the same way every that "underground" hip-hop album starts with a B-movie or cartoon sample, you can't write a druggy rock song without the I-IV chord progression ("IV", get it?! So clever, those junkies!), and if it's got a Jew's harp it's a Morricone score.
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3 comments:
You're harcore.
Maybe, you might like to check Philip Tagg's books about musical semiotics:
http://tagg.org/mmmsp/publications.html
Specifically "Ten Little Title Tunes" that has chapters about the "Amen cadence" and the mAdd9 chord. The "Fernando" book is fun also.
And to be amazed check his youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/etymophony/videos
Is ultra-mega-cool.
Thank you kindly! And cheers for the tip on Philip Tagg. I must admit I'm not familiar with the man's work, but it does seem pretty fascinating - especially "Ten Little Title Tunes" (as you said) and "Music's Meanings". And his YouTube channel is great brain candy; I admit that immediately after watching his "Tristan chord" montage, I inserted that very chord into a piece of music I'm working on...
"Information is free"... ebooks not quite ;)
Cheers, and good luck!
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