A while back I started noticing something interesting and odd about songs. Songs that are completely different from each other can start out in exactly the same way.<\/p>\n
I think we don’t usually notice such things because we are generally looking for the larger meaning of a song. Particulars of melody are received by us as merely part of a larger emotional story that the song is telling.<\/p>\n
For example, think of the title song from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls<\/i> and John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane<\/i>. It would be hard to think of two songs that are more different in genre and in underlying emotional message.<\/p>\n
Yet the first five notes of the melody of these two songs are identical (modulo transposition). They both start out 1-2-4-3-1 (do re fa me do) in the major diatonic scale.<\/p>\n
With a little thought, you can probably think of other pairs of songs that share this property of identical opening melodies. I wonder whether there is a word for this phenomenon.<\/p>\n
I’m open to suggestions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A while back I started noticing something interesting and odd about songs. Songs that are completely different from each other can start out in exactly the same way. I think we don’t usually notice such things because we are generally looking for the larger meaning of a song. Particulars of melody are received by us … Continue reading “Opening notes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21849"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21849"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21851,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21849\/revisions\/21851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}