Seeing the latest production of “Guys and Dolls” on Broadway this evening, I was reminded of something I noticed many years back: the title tune starts with the same five notes as John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane”: 1 2 4 3 1 of a major scale. For example, in the key of C major the notes would be: C D F E C.
Now, nobody would ever argue that the sardonic musical theatre of Frank Loesser has anything at all in common with the earnest late-sixties folk rock of Mr. Denver, and yet – as Edna Mode would say – here we are.
Are there, perhaps, certain combinations of notes that are so compelling that they can enter the brain of a composer spontaneously, just as a kind of proto life form can emerge from a mix of chemicals after an electric spark? Perhaps these lifeforms have the ability to jump from host to host, and thereby propagate, spawning progeny in the form of new songs that incorporate the same melodic theme.
After all, it is practically certain that John Denver would have heard the music from “Guys and Dolls” at least once, given the specific cultural eras involved, even if he was not consciously aware of Frank Loesser as an influence. And so the five note virus attached itself to a new creative brain, and spawned.
There are probably many thousands of such viral strains lurking out there by now, waiting to jump into the next song. I wonder whether we could study the gradual spread of certain recurring musical themes by applying the mathematics of epidemiology.
We often say a melody is catchy. Maybe there is more truth in this than we think.