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On our Back and Fourth page — about the legend of a music student caught handing in a backwards version of someone else's composition rather than creating his own — we discuss the concept that (in western music, at least) one cannot create a viable piece of music by simply reversing an existing work. This prompted many readers to write to us and maintain that John Lennon had done just that, creating the song Because (on the Beatles' Abbey Road album) by turning Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata backwards. Although there is some basis for this statement, Because is far from being merely a reversed version of a Beethoven work in the literal sense implied in the college legend. Beethoven's sonata in C-sharp minor (Op. 27, No. 2, originally titled quasi una fantasia and also known as the Arbor sonata), written in 1801, has been associated with a number of romantic stories. When the sonata was published in 1803 it was dedicated to his young piano student Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, but Beethoven apparently did not have her in mind at the time he wrote it. The Moonlight Sonata (a title not given to the piece until after Beethoven's death) was immediately popular upon publication and has remained the most well-known of Beethoven's sonatas ever since, although most people are familiar only with the first of the sonata's three movements. John Lennon's dream-like Because, recorded in gorgeous nine-part harmony (three voices recorded three times) for the Beatles' final album in 1969, shares several attributes — its key (C-sharp minor), its chord structure, and its use of arpeggios (tones of a chord played in succession rather than simultaneously) — with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but Because is not at all a song created by simply turning a Beethoven work around from back to front. Finding similarities between the music of the Beatles and Beethoven is intriguing because it highlights a commonality between the (supposedly antithetical) high art of a cultured classical composer and the popular music of four provincial, musically unschooled and self-taught Liverpudlian youths, and the idea of the Beatles' turning a piece of music backwards certainly requires no stretch of the imagination when one recalls their use of reversed vocals in the fade-out of Rain or the backwards guitar solo in I'm Only Sleeping. However, Because is more accurately described as a song based upon or inspired by the reverse structure of a Beethoven piece rather than as 'Moonlight Sonata' backwards. John Lennon himself is the person responsible for the backwards claim, having explained the origins of Because many times in words similar to the following: However, a survey of John's (and Yoko's) comments about Because demonstrate that what Lennon had in mind was a song based upon a reversal of Moonlight Sonata's chord progression, not literally a backwards version of the piece: Readers interested in a technical discussion of the musical similarities between Because and Moonlight Sonata might enjoy Ian Hammond's essay on the subject from his Beathoven series.
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