Walter Meyer is trying to identify a theme. The following account from a
friend of mine may be of some interest.

My friend writes:

   A few years ago (well, about twenty-five, actually) I helped the late
   Denys Parsons with a book that he was producing to enable the reader
   to identify a tune where he could remember how it went but not its
   composer or title.  For the starting note Denys always wrote an
   asterisk (because it's essential not to leave it out): thereafter,
   for each successive note you put a D for down, an R for repeat, or
   a U for up.  So 'God Save The King', for example, would start

      *RUDUU URUDD DUDDU

   The interpolated spaces after the sixth and eleventh notes are merely
   to add visual clarity, and have nothing to do with the phrasing of
   the tune.  The size of the musical interval, up or down, is irrelevant
   and so are the note-lengths and key.  It's simple and ingenious, and
   anyone could have invented it over the past millennium, but nobody
   did until Denys Parsons!

   Having discovered, with a relatively small sample of themes, that
   the system appeared to work Denys wrote letters to various musical
   journals appealing for help with the enormous task of coding what
   turned out to be some 13,000 themes.  I saw his letter in the March
   1972 issue of Opera and responded to it.  There were all sorts of
   problems, like how to get access to all the scores required, what to
   include and what to leave out, what happens when more than one tune
   has the same profile, what to do about trills and appoggiaturas, etc.
   etc.

   Ultimately the book was divided into two sections: 'classical' themes
   (the major part) and 'popular' themes, which I believe Denys did
   almost single-handedly.  In each section they are listed alphabetically,
   starting with

      *DDDDDD DDDDD DDDDD

   and ending with

      *UUUUU UUUUU UUUUU

   so you use it like a telephone directory.  The system was always
   known to us as DRUM, standing for Down, Repeat, Up Method, but the
   publisher wanted a more sober title.  So it came out, in spring 1975,
   as The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes.  It was acknowledged
   as being complementary to the Dictionaries by Barlow and Morgenstern
   which solve the problem 'the other way round' i.e.  they show you in
   musical notation the various themes of, say, Beethoven's Choral
   Symphony (fifteen are listed) in the order they occur in the work.

   Denys got me an early copy of DRUM, hot off the press, and we saw
   the dust-jacket for the first time.  This gave on the back a brief
   quote from the enthusiastic introduction by Bernard Levin, and a very
   brief one attributed to Andre Previn.  This just said, "...  hilarious
   and amazing ..." Neither of us had any idea that Previn had been shown
   the book or knew anything about it, so I resolved to ask him.

   In those days we sometimes did what you might call a 'weekend double':
   Saturday night at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon and a repeat performance
   on Sunday at the RFH. So the final tutti rehearsal took place in Croydon.
   Thus it was that I found myself, during the break, in the canteen of the
   Fairfield Hall on 24 May 1975 (we were rehearsing the Brahms Requiem)
   armed with a brand-new copy of the book. Previn was sitting with John
   Shirley-Quirk (and maybe Heather Harper as well) having coffee. I plucked
   up my courage and approached.

   "Excuse me, Mr Previn," I said, "but have you seen that this
   Directory of Tunes has come out?"

   "No," he said, "what is it?"

   "Well, I assume you know about it, as you have made this
   comment," I replied, showing him the dust-jacket.

   "I know nothing about it," he said. "How does it work?"

   I explained as briefly as I could.

   "Let's try it out," he said, warming to the idea.  At this point I
   was filled with trepidation, thinking that he would be sure to select
   some obscure theme that wouldn't be in the book, but I needn't have
   worried.  He chose the opening horn melody of Brahms' B flat Piano
   Concerto, which I knew would be there!  So I helped him to write down
   the code (on a paper napkin thoughtfully provided by the Management
   of the Fairfield Hall):

      *UUUDD UUUDD DDDUU

   and we looked it up.  There, on page 184, we found: Brahms piano
   concerto/2 in Bflat op83 1m 1t (the latter signifying first movement,
   first theme).  "Well," he said, "I may not have called it hilarious
   and amazing before, but I certainly do now!  Can you get me sent a
   copy?"

   I reported this exchange to Denys and he queried the quote with the
   publisher, who insisted that Previn had said it.  We never did resolve
   what really happened.  Perhaps the publisher was blessed with the
   gift of precognition: I believe Denys first met him at the Society
   for Psychical Research.

   I have quite a large file of reviews and press-cuttings about DRUM.
   Most were enthusiastic and complimentary, especially the one in Hi-Fi
   News, which devoted its September 1975 editorial comment (by John
   Crabbe) to the book.  However Eric Sams, writing in the New Statesman,
   headed his review "DUD".  One of his gripes was that not enough German
   Lieder were included.  Stung by this criticism I decided to code a
   lot more Lieder, including virtually all of Hugo Wolf's, in the hope
   that the book might soon warrant a second edition.  Sadly, no second
   edition has ever appeared (though the whole book, including many
   additions and stylistic corrections, exists on computer disk).

   Using data from the book, Denys later analysed the first three notes
   of themes by major composers and discovered that each tended to adopt
   certain starting profiles more often than might be ascribed to chance.
   This was the subject of an article in New Scientist on 24 March 1977,
   whose front cover depicts twenty-two famous composers all apparently
   day-dreaming of, or perhaps composing, tunes starting "*UU"!  I know
   that Denys, although he was always looking for new ideas and projects
   to work on, was sad that DRUM never quite achieved the success he
   had hoped for.

   Footnote: Denys Parsons was the son of the actress Viola Tree.  He
   wrote a number of other books, some useful and some amusing.  The
   best-known are probably the series of paperbacks published by Pan,
   with titles like Funny Ha-Ha and Funny Peculiar, which reproduced
   misprints and double meanings from publications around the world.
   His son Alan was until recently the Managing Director of the Abbey
   Road Studios, but is perhaps better known for the Alan Parsons Project.

My friend does of course still have a copy of The Directory of Tunes and
Musical Themes, and I have sent Walter's theme to him, translated into DRUM
as:

   *RRUU UDRRR UUUDU RUDDD DUURD UUDDDD

It will be interesting to see if the theme appears. I'll let you know.

Alan Moss