Sometimes, very rarely, a good melody lives on beyond its original creation and creates a many-storied life of its own. But how long must a great tune live before we can call it immortal?

One of the really basic but ineffable questions about music is: What is it that makes a melody, even a very simple tune great? These great melodies have been created by famous composers, but also unsophisticated folk musicians. No one has yet cracked the code of the great melody and maybe that’s a good thing. Otherwise we’d be bombed with AI created pop tunes. (Yipes, maybe we already are!)

This is the story of just one of these immortal tunes.

Paul Simon said that he took the melody for his song “American Tune” from one of the chorales in Johann Sebastian Bach’s massive masterpiece, the St Matthew’s Passion (BWV 244).

But Bach didn’t write the tune, although he must have loved it because he uses the melody (with different  texts and harmonizations) no less than five times within the 2.5 hour course of the St. Matthew’s Passion. This 5-minute video recaps four of the five versions, each expressing a different text and with appropriately different harmonies and dynamics:

Read the rest of this entry »