Hiding in Plain Sight: The Greatest Musical Easter Egg Ever

5 min

I just tripped over a music theory Easter egg that’s been hiding in plain sight for 50 years. It’s easy to understand with a little explanation, and it just had to be intentional.

Last week I wrote about Mozart’s use of non-harmonic tones — pitches that don’t belong to the chord of the moment:

They usually fit one of 12 rules (patterns with the notes around them), which is how your ear makes sense of the pitch despite it being a chordal immigrant.

One of the simplest non-harmonic patterns is the neighbor tone. Start on a note that’s in the chord, go up or down a step, then back to the first. That’s a neighbor tone. The syllable birth in the crime against humanity called “Happy Birthday” is an upper neighbor. See? It’s right next door.

Go down instead of up and you have a lower neighbor, a lа̀ Jurassic Park:

0:07

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msimASAXoys” parameters=”start=171 end=178″ /]

Here’s the Jurassic melody with the neighbors marked:

 

 

 

And when Whitney Houston sang And ahhhhh-eee-yaaaii will always love yooou, the “eee” was an upper neighbor.

You get the idea.

I wanted one more neighbor tone for this post, so I started singing the lower neighbor pattern to myself, like the three Jurassic notes, to see if anything popped into my head. Dah-dah-dah, I sang.

Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, I sang, then a little faster. DAH-dah-dah DAH-dah-dah.

Wait.

Oh my god, no way.

And also OF COURSE.

The theme to Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood…is absolutely brimming with neighbors.

You think this is a coincidence, I can tell. Let’s just see about that.

Fred Rogers wrote the words and lyrics himself in 1967. He changed it a bit for the show — more on that below — but fortunately his original arrangement is still in publication, so we can see his intent. I’ve transposed the first four bars to the key he sang in the show:

It’s not surprising that he wrote his own theme song — Rogers’ 1951 bachelor’s degree was in music composition. And when somebody with a degree in music composition writes a song with the word “neighbor” in it 6,000 times and includes neighbor tones in the melody, that’s no coincidence. It’s easy to imagine his quiet satisfaction at a geeky inside joke that virtually no one would ever get.

Hm. You’re still unconvinced. So this fairly common non-harmonic note pops up a couple of times in the song, you say, big deal. That doesn’t mean it was intentional.

Here are those four bars again with the neighbor tones marked:

Seventeen neighbors in four bars, including a double neighbor on the word neighbor? This is too densely-populated a neighborhood to be a coincidence. This is a music major having fun.

Interestingly, by the time the show premiered in 1968, he ironed most of the neighbors out of the vocal line, substituting a straight line of Gs. Maybe he felt the waggling back and forth got in the way of understanding the words, or that it would be too hard for the kids to sing along at home, especially the way it throws off the accent in the triplets. I can easily see him sacrificing his little inside joke so we could feel more comfortable.

But it isn’t completely gone. In addition to several remaining spots in the vocal, listen to the celeste (0:06-0:10) and the piano (0:24-0:28). Still brimming with neighbors.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eInUUfyqa5o” /]

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When the Music Doesn’t Trust You

15 min

A few posts back I wrote about mickeymousing, a film scoring technique in which the music closely imitates actions on screen. Good for cartoons and parodies, bad for most everything else. Another usually no-good technique is continuous scoring, also known as wallpaper.

Wallpaper is film music that never seems to shut up. Instead of trusting the audience to know how to feel, it nudges and winks every time the emotion turns even slightly — Ooh see? It’s happy. Oh, now it’s sad. Oh! He surprised her. The genre films of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” (1927 to early 1960s) are notorious for unrelenting wallpaper of the distrustful kind.

High Noon (score by Dimitri Tiomkin) is a classic example. BONUS MOMENT: At 1:50-2:00, as Glinda the Good Witch chastises the sheriff, the movie’s main theme “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” plays in minor. Five seconds later as she says, “Oh Will, we were married just a few minutes ago,” it switches to major. That may be the hammiest moment in all film music.

1:34

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm0iEYCUw5I” parameters=”start=58″ /]

Here’s some typical wallpaper from the 1940s — The Strange Woman (score by Carmen Dragon):

1:25

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNsgtXnukyE” parameters=”start=2716 end=2801″ /]

That kind of wall-to-wall scoring mostly ended in the early 70s. But continuous scoring still makes an appearance, often with great results. When it maintains a single emotional arrow toward a climax instead of shadowing every emotional change, it can be really effective. That’s especially true when the music persists despite emotional shifts in the action, as it does in this stunning scene from There Will Be Blood (main score by Johnny Greenwood, this scene by Arvo Pärt):

2:22

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugTbwvVuLKA” /]

Two small pauses, but still mostly continuous.

Then there’s my favorite, the kind of continuous scoring that serves as a unifying emotional thread through a montage of scene cuts. First this gorgeous, moving sequence, again from There Will Be Blood (Johnny Greenwood):

2:37

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0dlraJXats” /]

Then there’s this heartbreaking thing. Instead of distrust, the continuous scoring plays a crucial part in establishing the emotion — and it takes me to pieces every time I see this film (Love Actually, song by Joni Mitchell):

2:24

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y-8vxObugM” parameters=”start=72″ /]

Finally there’s the kind that elevates a scene, makes it epic. Repeating and building as it goes, this scoring by Hans Zimmer imbues a few mundane actions — man deplanes, walks through customs, arrives at house, greets children — with power and significance (Inception):

3:42

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQPy88-E2zo” /]

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The Real Inspiration for The Simpsons Theme – And No, It’s Not ‘Maria’

5 min

When in the last post I suggested that a trumpet lick in The Simpsons was an homage to “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story, I didn’t mention an even more obvious parallel — that the first three notes of Simpsons exactly equal the first three notes of the main melody of “Maria”:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpdB6CN7jww” parameters=”start=39 end=42″ /]

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r2EbNSymjE” parameters=”start=2 end=5″ /]

Here’s why I left it out: Unlike the trumpet lick, the opening of the Simpsons theme was definitely not inspired by “Maria.” Elfman was paying tribute to something, but it wasn’t West Side Story. It was The Jetsons.

Back in the 1990s, if a producer really really liked a composer, he would give him a mix tape. As The Simpsons was in development, Matt Groening gave Danny Elfman a tape with all of his favorite cartoon music. He loved the music for Warner Bros. cartoons and Tom & Jerry, but he didn’t want to use that technique known as “mickeymousing” in which the music closely parrots the action on screen. That left Hanna Barbera, including Groening’s favorite cartoon theme of all: “I loved The Jetsons theme the best,” he said.

In no time, Elfman cranked out an iconic theme with a headmotive that bears a striking resemblance to his boss’s favorite:

Also not a coincidence: both are in that unusual Lydian dominant mode I banged on about last time — 4 up and 7 down.

Oh but that’s not all. The whole Simpsons opening sequence is an inside-out parody of The Jetsons opening sequence. In The Jetsons, you start with blue sky and Dad driving away from home. Two kids go to school, then Mom goes shopping, then Dad arrives at work. In The Simpsons, you start with blue sky and Dad driving FROM work, Mom leaves the store, the kids leave school, and they all converge at home.

Both openings are below. For maximum fun, play them at the same time. For more convincing, listen to the short Groening interview below.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r2EbNSymjE” /]

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSptqzfTSSE” parameters=”start=8 ” /]

Here’s the smoking gun:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UthzUr0rFQ” /]

Feature image Ludie Cochrane CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr