"This Will Be Our Year"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

---&---

In December last year, I wrote a short post talking about the bass part for "This Will Be Our Year" (which is a chromatic phrase from A down to E), specifically how in recent live shows, Jim Rodford plays it with an octave between each note.  I'd made the connection between this and some organ part, which - at the time - I couldn't place.

I later found out that the organ piece I had in mind was Robert Schumann's fourth fugue ("Mässig, doch nicht zu langsam") on the theme of B-A-C-H, Op. 60 (found here):

After discovering this, I realized that the connection I was positing wasn't valid because, while Schumann's piece does contain sequential half-steps (like the bass part for "This Will Be Our Year"), they're not separated by octaves.

However, listening to an album of Liszt's organ works to-day, I discovered that he (Liszt) also wrote a fugue on the theme B-A-C-H.  So I looked it up, and those two half-steps in Schumann's fugue are that B-A-C-H theme: B flat, A, C, B natural (presumably it's also in the Liszt fugue, but I didn't look up the notation for that).  According to the Wikipedia article for BACH Motif: "In German musical nomenclature… the note B natural is written as H and the B flat as B, [so] it forms Johann Sebastian Bach's family name.”

So while the specific half-steps in Schumann's fugue weren't adopted into the "This Will Be Our Year" bass part, they are connected to Bach, whom Rod Argent was interested in.  And if Bach's playing around with half-steps was what interested Rod Argent in the same thing, there could still be a connection between the B-A-C-H theme and Rod Argent's bass parts, which often contain two sequential half-steps ("Whenever You're Ready" has A, Ab, G, for instance).  That might not be the case here, as "This Will Be Our Year" is a Chris White song (which I always seem to forget), but this still illustrates a connection between Bach and the Zombies, whether or not his work was a conscious influence.