On Jul 13, 2019, at 3:37 AM, Daniel Shoskes, with admirable conciseness, wrote:
> https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/queen-we-are-champions-rite-of-spring/ I hear the correspondence of some of the notes of the opening of Rite of Spring with the chorus of We Are the Champions, but don’t hear enough musical similarity to get me speculating about whether there was an actual link. The first time I heard Rite of Spring, at age 11 or 12, I was struck immediately by how similar the opening was to a phrase from the 1934 song, “Little Man You’ve Had a Busy Day,” with which it shares a six-note sequence starting with the second syllable of “crying:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0UVV0TNr_g&frags=pl%2Cwn The song seems to have serious legs over the years. Eric Clapton recorded it in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaFRAVyskwE&frags=pl%2Cwn Rite of Spring is rightly considered a revolutionary work, but it’s also a collection of really good tunes, and if you put Italian lyrics to that opening solo and stuck it in a Puccini aria, it would fit right in. And of course, Freddie Mercury was heavily into early 20th-century Italian opera. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
