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
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