PSB songs based on classical compositions (and some others with "classical connections")
The chord progression is derived from the first movement Ludwig van Beethoven's 1802 work Piano Sonata Opus 27 No. 2, better known as the Moonlight Sonata. In fact, the Boys' pre-lyric working title for the track was "Moonlight."
2. Go West
Courtesy of the Village People, the chord progression and melody of this song are derived from the well-known Canon in D by the 17th-century German composer Johann Pachelbel.
The music playing behind the spoken verses is from Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov's 1915 work Vocalise.
4. Jack the Lad
Neil describes the opening piano motif as "a pastiche of Erik Satie," and indeed that as well as the song's overall chord progression are highly reminiscent of Gymnopédie Number 1—one of the Trois Gymnopédies written in 1887 by French composer Satie. In addition, the melody bears a passing similarity to that work, but closer comparison reveals that the melodies are not at all the same.
The chord structure comes from the choral "Ode to Joy" in the fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony Number 9 in D Minor (1824). Chris has stated how much he dislikes Beethoven's Ninth, the "Ode to Joy" portion in particular. (As he once put it, "You can tell he was deaf when he wrote it.") But that obviously didn't stop him from making use of its chord structure.
6. Liberation
This one stretches it, but Neil has noted that the first two notes of this song—"just the first two notes"—were taken from the theme for Friar Laurence in the ballet Romeo and Juliet by the twentieth-century Ukrainian/Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. Neil was listening to it while taking a bath at home, when those two notes "triggered" in his mind the melody for "Liberation." This caused him to leap from the tub and rush downstairs to his piano. Must've been an interesting scene.
Neil has said that the strings heard in the background of this track are based on Gustav Mahler—as he put it, "a few bars from the adagio of one of his symphonies." Although Neil stated that he's unsure which one because he chose it "at random," one of my site visitors has positively identified it as Mahler's Fifth Symphony, familiar to many as the evocative music used extensively in the 1971 film Death in Venice starring Dirk Bogarde.
The Pet Shop Boys have noted that this song on their 2009 album Yes was written by them "with a little help from Tchaikovsky." They specifically borrowed the fanfare (slightly slowed down) from the March from The Nutcracker (Op. 71:II), which opens the song and pops up again from time to time. They also make use of the March's chord progression. The "new version" of the track released on the Boys' Christmas EP incorporates a few additional melodic themes from The Nutcracker as well. As a sidenote, it's worth observing that early in their career Chris Lowe told an interviewer that he used to imagine that the spirit of Tchaikovsky composed music through him.
9. King of Rome
It comes only at the very end, but I guess that's enough to earn a place in this list. Neil has noted that the concluding chord changes of this song are taken from a portion of Metamorphosen by the German composer Richard Strauss.
10. Hold On
This song from the album Elysium is, as Neil stated in a 2012 PSB interview for Mixmag, "based on this piece of music by Handel that I heard on the radio." The specific composition turned out to be "Eternal Source of Light Divine," the opening section of Handel's 1713 work Birthday Ode for Queen Anne. Neil had originally intended that he and Chris should write a new song based on only the first eight bars. But Chris ended up using "Handel's 64 bars of chords," though composing a completely new melody on top of them. He also turned a trumpet obbligato from the original into a recurring synth line. In the interview, Neil added, "By the way, Handel's chords are fantastic, amazing."
11. Love Is a Bourgeois Construct
This song has the distinction of being based on classical compositions "squared," so to speak. That is, it's based on the piece "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds" from the 1982 film score for The Draughtsman's Contract by the contemporary British composer Michael Nyman. And "Chasing Sheep…" itself is based on a melodic theme from the Prelude to Act III, Scene 2 of English composer Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur. The Pet Shop Boys and the Electric album's producer, Stuart Price, even employed Purcell's sheet music in creating the song's introductory passage.
The arpeggios and chord sequence upon which the verses of this song are built are derived from eight bars of Introduzioni al Miserere - Filiae Maestae Jerusalem (year of composition uncertain) by the Italian baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi.
13. Twenty-something
Like "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" before it (see #11 above), Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur proved a source for this song as well. In this case the Boys adapted the chord structure of "The Cold Song" from that opera for the song's verses.
14. Motoring
The instrumental opening of this track and its reprise at the end—most notably its rhytmic pattern—were inspired by The Rite of Spring (1913) by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
This closer to the album Hotspot incorporates the familiar opening phrase of German romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" in C major, likely written in 1842 but not published or performed publicly until the following year. It was originally part of his suite of incidental music (Op. 61) written for theatrical performances of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. After Queen Victoria asked that it be performed at the 1858 wedding of her daughter Victoria, the Princess Royal, it became a standard piece of music performed at weddings in the United Kingdom and, soon after, the United States and elsewhere.
16. Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You)
Although it wasn't a PSB original and wasn't written by the Boys—its composers instead being Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe—the melody and chord progression of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" (its original title, without the "I") bear a pronounced similarity to the introductory theme of Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from the 1954 ballet Spartacus by Aram Khachaturian. Whether Gaudio and Crewe knowingly borrowed the music in this manner has not, to my knowledge, ever been addressed.
… and a few others that, while not based on classical compositions, nevertheless have distinct "classical connections":
- Birthday Boy
At its very end, this track includes a sample from a recording of the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, performing a setting of the Christmas hymn "In the Bleak Midwinter" by English composer Harold Edwin Darke.
- The Clock 7/8/9
One could argue that the Boys' ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, is one great big "classical connection." But we can also zero in this particular track, which briefly includes the primary "Ode to Joy" melody from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony played on chimes as part of its "9 o'clock" segment.
- Fugitive/Integral medley / I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing
Neil and Chris performed a medley of two of their Fundamental-era songs at the opening show of their 2013 Electric Tour, concluding it with a sample from the aforementioned The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. This proved most appropriate in that it immediately flowed into a performance of their Very-era song that actually mentions The Rite of Spring, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing."
- Heart
- I Made My Excuses and Left
During an interview in support of their album Fundamental, they noted that they got the idea of building this song up from a sample of Chris singing "I'm all alone again" into his cell phone from the 1971 composition "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" by the minimalist British composer Gavin Bryars, which he had based on a loop of a recording of a homeless man singing the title phrase.
- Indefinite
Leave to Remain
Neil has said that this song was based at least partly on "a Bach chord change" that Chris modified slightly. The introductory brass chorale serves to heighten its rather "hymnal" feel.
- It Doesn't Often Snow at Christmas
The Boys' 2009 Christmas EP offers a new version of their "official Christmas song" that, unlike the original track, incorporates brief instrumental segments of the carols "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" and "Once in Royal David's City"—the melodies of which were written by German composer Felix Mendelssohn and British composer Henry Gauntlett, respectively.
- Left to My Own Devices
The "Disco Mix" (by Robin Hancock) of this song takes a cue from the lyric's famous line "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat," adding a few brief measures of a clearly Debussy-esque orchestral sequence immediately afterward. The quoted segment almost certainly comes from about two-thirds of the way through one of Debussy's best-known compositions, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune ("Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun").
- Loneliness
The swirling, haunting strings at the beginning of the track as well as their recurrence (with chimes) at the end are clearly inspired by (if not actually sampled from, though that's uncertain at this time) the opening portion of the 1977 composition Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, of whom Neil is known to be an admirer. The descending chord structure of the song may also have been inspired by the descending chord pattern of the Pärt composition, though in the song the chords themselves are different and the structure far simpler. Or maybe it was the other way around, with the song's descending chord pattern coming first, which then could have encouraged the Boys to employ the Pärt piece (or at least music inspired by it) as an intro and outro.
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Neil has stated that this track conatins "a reference to minimalist classical music—the marimbas are a reference to Steve Reich's Six Marimbas." Reich is a contemporary American composer whose work Six Pianos debuted in 1973. Six Marimbas from 1986 is his transposition and rearrangement of that same piece for, of course, marimbas.
- Miserablism
- My October
Symphony
Although it opens with a "choral shout" of the Russian word for "October" sampled from a recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 2, and it boasts a string coda performed by the Balanescu String Quartet that's written "vaguely in the style of Shostakovich," the song "My October Symphony" doesn't seem to be based on any particular classical composition.
- The Sound of the Atom Splitting
This track emerged from an experiment with the aforementioned "Left to My Own Devices" in which the Boys themselves, together with Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson, tried to realize Horn's desire to put "Debussy to a disco beat." In a lengthy free-form studio jam, the four of them built this recording around a sequence of "Debussy-ish" chords—though not a specific Debussy work. They decided against using it in "Devices" itself, instead turning it into this, one of the most controversial tracks in the entire PSB canon.
- This
Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave
As I note in my list of PSB songs with "Russian connections," this track contains a very brief snippet taken from composer Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 2.
- Together
Neil has reportedly said that he and Chris composed this song in 3/4 time—a rarity for them—because they were fascinated by the waltzes by late nineteenth-century Viennese composer Johann Strauss II, known in his own lifetime as "The Waltz King." They apparently wanted to see if they could come up with a song that might sound like something he could have composed if he were their contemporary.
According to Neil, the famous "uh-uh-oh-oh-uh" refrain contains a sample of Luciano Pavarotti's voice (as well as the voice of Prefab Sprout's Wendy Smith). You certainly wouldn't know it just from listening. But if the great operatic tenor Pavarotti isn't a "classical connection," I don't know what is.
This track contains a brief sample from Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony during the middle instrumental break. As Neil puts it—probably with tongue in cheek—he was in his "Shostakovich phase."
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