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Back in March, I started re-reading John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. In Chapter 5 (The Mechanics of Faith), Gardiner mentions the continuo part in the third movement of Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4 (page 134, if you're that interested). It plays a "two-note interval… with octave displacement." This sounded like the octave-skipping bass part that Jim Rodford plays in some recent live versions of "This Will Be Our Year" (it's in the version on the Live at Metropolis Studios album, and I think it's in the version on Extended Versions too).
I looked into the continuo part for BWV 4 a few days ago, but - if I'm reading my bass clef correctly (for which there's reason to doubt) - that continuo part descends diatonically. The bass part for "This Will Be Our Year" is chromatic, so I gave up trying to find a connection between them.
I didn't think anything more of this until yester-day when I was listening to Bach's Orchestral Suite, No. 3, BWV 1068. I'd thought I'd heard the B-A-C-H motif in the second movement when I listened to it a few days before, so I pulled out the score (which I actually own a physical copy of) and looked at the notation while listening. I didn't find the B-A-C-H motif (I don't think there's one there), but I did find a similar "two-note interval… with octave displacement," so I got thinking about this again.
I've been thinking about these similarities so much that now I feel like I'm trying to force them together, but they do have some things in common, even if it's just coincidental. (And Argent's mentioned his love of Bach before, so it's possible that there's something intentional behind this.) There's that "octave displacement," and while the bass part in "This Will Be Our Year" is chromatic (during the verses at least), there are some semi-tone pairs in Bach's continuo parts:
I did the notation for "This Will Be Our Year" myself, so it's quite possible that there are errors. I included the chords (simplified a bit) just so that it's slightly more clear how the bass part goes with the chords.
[I've been thinking about this for a few days now, and I'm still not sure if it makes much sense, but I'm posting it anyway.]
