In my continuing quest to learn the classical canon through remixing with Ableton Live, I’ve taken on Bach’s Minuet in G major. Which is apparently not by Bach at all, but rather by some guy named Christian Petzold. Live and learn.
A minuet is a dance, but in 2018, it’s hard to dance in triple meter. So as usual, I wanted to put the piece in 4/4, and give it a better beat. Here’s the result:
The beats are sampled from “Soul Love” by David Bowie, “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” by the Beatles, and “Overtake Overtake Don Overtake” by Fela Kuti.
I converted this to 4/4 not in any systematic way, but just by stretching the MIDI to 4/3 of its length and quantizing it. From there, I moved notes around until they sounded right. Here’s the score for what I came up with.
In general, my strategy appears to have been to add an extra beat to the first one in each measure. But often I only added half a beat to create a funkier tresillo feel.
I turn out not to have been the first person to think of putting this piece of music in 4/4. Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell did it back in the 1960s, and they wrote lyrics too.
This whole project was prompted because my five year old son Milo had a piano lesson where the minuet in G came up briefly. Since that lesson, we’ve had my 4/4 remix in heavy rotation around the house, and the kids dig the melody. Now Milo walks around singing the tune to himself, but he’s singing my version of it. Am I committing music educational malpractice here, or am I moving our culture forward? I like to think it’s the latter.
If you’re interested, I also found this “funky” arrangement of Bach’s E Major Violin Partita: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwuxvEn6wA0&t=577s
I am interested, this is very cool.
I used to be in a band called Tradiohead (mash-up of traditional Irish and Radiohead covers, basically) where we did this kind of thing a lot. For instance, taking a slip jig (9/8) and chopping off the final quaver of each bar to make it fit over a chord pattern in 4/4. Of course, the accented beats change completely. Also tweaking the key signature of a tune to make it fit a different mode or unusual chord progression. Much fun to be had!