Bach and Paul Simon
Since it was Easter yesterday, Anna wanted to listen to Bach's St Matthew Passion while we did stuff around the house.
A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" -- in English, "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9yp-sVrOjo This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place it. Anna says she's sung it many times in church. Bach didn't write it; the text is an older Latin poem translated into German by Paul Gerhardt, set by Johann Crüger to a secular love song called "Mein G'müt ist mir verwirret" by Hans Leo Hassler. The same tune appears in a wildly chromatic setting later on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v9gpKli4rM Bach also recycled the tune in a number of other works. For example, the chorale in the Christmas Oratorio is yet another strange chromatic harmonization: https://youtu.be/98UjjwzJBFE?t=1037 I wasn't familiar with the other Bach usages, though. The real reason for my musical déjà vu is that the hymn is the basis for Paul Simon's classic "American Tune." Here's a performance from 1974 -- Paul's hair and mustache were unfortunate at that time, but his music sounded great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE3kKUEY5WU Here's another performance, thirty-four years later, on the Colbert Report, and here's Paul performing it in a duet with Willie Nelson. For maximum enjoyment, try singing "American Tune" over the Bach video above, a lot of it fits perfectly. I also made a mashup of them. Paul Simon may not have learned the hymn directly from Bach; it's more likely that he got it from folksinger Tom Glazer, who used it in his tune "Because All Men Are Brothers." Here's a recording by Peter, Paul and Mary, accompanied by Dave Brubeck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c93G3GuaA-Q I made a family tree of all this music:
Bach feels more contemporary and relevant to me than most of his bewigged eighteenth-century European peers. I never made the connection before between one of my favorite Paul Simon tunes and my favorite Baroque composer, but in retrospect it seems obvious. The whole thing confirms my belief that the most creative artists are the least original. Art is a process of recombining existing memes, not creating new ideas out of whole cloth. The deepest music taps into rich veins of shared musical heritage spanning centuries and continents, from the mists of European history through a devoutly Christian Austrian to a series of earnest American folk singers to me. I was told by a Bach-loving friend that I'll be hearing the "O Sacred Head" chords everywhere now that I'm paying attention. If you have some examples to share, please let me know. Update: Here's Paul Simon explaining his songwriting process to Dick Cavett: https://youtu.be/qFt0cP-klQI?t=327