On Jan 23, 2014, at 3:01 PM, R. Mattes <[email protected]> wrote:

> if you exdend it and go up again
> you end up with something often called "Pachelbel-Sequence".


A poster on another list some years ago asserted that Pachelbel’s canon is 
based on the Aria del Granduca.  

If you look at sequences of four or five notes, you’re going to find all sorts 
of correlations.  Think twice about concluding there’s a causal connection.  
There are only so many combinations of notes, and similarity does not mean 
identity, as we’ve had occasion to remind posters who’ve maintained that the 
renaissance vihuela and the charango, or the viola da gamba and the guitar, are 
the same instrument.

In 1959, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic did a television 
broadcast featuring music with themes that started with “How Dry I Am”  
(G-C-D-E).  It included the second movement of the D major Water Music Suite, 
the Moldau, the Merry Widow Waltz, the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata, the slow 
movement of Beethoven’s Second Symphony,  Brahms’ 1st Piano Concerto, Strauss’ 
Death and Transfiguration (end), the Nocturne from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer 
Night’s Dream, Copland’s Appalachian Spring dressing of Simple Gifts, “The 
Party’s Over,” the horn solo from Till Eulenspiegel, then gets into themes that 
use the same notes in different orders, then gets into the theme in minor: the 
finale of the Pathetique sonata, and the the entire last movement of 
Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. He somehow missed the famous quickstep from the 
1812 overture.  

The show was called “The Infinite Variety of Music.”  You can read the script 
in his book of the same name, or, if you have 48 minutes and 46 seconds to 
kill, listen to it on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRKw8MENoCs


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