The Moody Blues' "House of Four Doors (Part 1)"

Yester-day I listened to the Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord, and I discovered two things about "House of Four Doors (Part 1)."

I'm not sure to what degree, but it seems that the inscription on the last door bears some resemblance to the Gate of Hell in Dante's Inferno.  In "House of Four Doors (Part 1)," there are the lines "Enter in, all ye who seek to find within / As the plaque said on the last door."  It seems to be the opposite of "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" (Canto III, line 9).

The other thing I noticed is the melody to which the middle section ("House of Four Doors / I could live there forever...") is sung.  When I first listened to this album two years ago, I wrote about a piano part later in this song that I thought took a phrase from George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  This "House of Four Doors / I could live there forever..." section uses the same melody, and it has more of a resemblance to Gershwin's.  The piano part has just the three note diatonic ascent and octave fall, but the vocal melody - like the phrase in the Rhapsody in Blue - has a diatonic ascent after that octave fall.  While they're in different keys and the note values are different, the intervals are the same.  I still haven't been able to find the Rhapsody in Blue score (I've found a lot pieces that quote it but have been unable to look at the original notation to see how they all compare), but here's some notation I made for this particular section of "House of Four Doors (Part One)":

(click here for a larger image)

Ben Selvin and His Orchestra's "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!"

For the last week or so, I've been making my way through a 10-CD set of George Gershwin works.  To-day, it's disc 7, subtitled "The Later Broadway Musicals."  I'm actually not sure if I'd noticed this before or not, but I recognized a melodic phrase in "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!" (performed by Ben Selvin and His Orchestra) that's also in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  After the initial "Oh gee! Oh gosh! Oh joy! Oh golly!," there's "Oh gee I'm happy 'cause my baby loves me."  The melody to which it's sung is something like this:

The same phrase (a half step higher) is in the Rhapsody in Blue.  In the recording I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it's in the piano part at about 6:52.

I lookt up "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!" in the index of Edward Jablonski's Gershwin: A Biography (which I actually haven't read yet) and found that it was written for Rosalie in late 1927.  The Rhapsody in Blue is from 1924, so it seems like Gershwin re-used that melody from the Rhapsody as an introductory phrase in "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!"  Of course, there's also the possibility that this feature is unique to Selvin's version, but in either case, that melody came from the Rhapsody first.

Django Reinhardt's "Paramount Stomp"

I'm currently listening to the second disc of a two-CD Django Reinhardt set.  I'm not sure if I noticed this before or not, but I discovered that at the end of "Paramount Stomp" (starting at about 2:20), there's a quote of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  In the Rhapsody in Blue, that phrase is in the clarinet opening (although in "Paramount Stomp" it lacks the opening trill and glissando it has in the Rhapsody), and - if I'm not mistaken - it occurs elsewhere in the Rhapsody too.

The Gershwin quotes makes a certain amount of sense since Reinhardt recorded some other Gershwin songs.  Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" is on the same disc, and the first disc in this set includes and is subtitled "Lady Be Good" (Classic Jazz Archive, Disc 1 - Lady Be Good).

The Moody Blues' "House of Four Doors (Part 1)"

I just listened to the Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord for the first time.  I'm not sure, but I think they quote part of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" in "House of Four Doors (Part 1)."  At around 3:15, a melody emerges from the rumbling.  As far as I can figure out, the notes are C# D E A.  What I think is a corresponding melody occurs in "Rhapsody in Blue" at around 11:30 in the version I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.  I'm pretty sure that it's G# A B and then E and B (an octave lower) simultaneously.  Simplified to representative notes of the scale, it's the third, the fourth, the fifth, and the tonic (plus the fifth in the case of "Rhapsody in Blue," if I have it correct).  These two sections are either in the same rhythm or a very similar rhythm, and after each, the melody continues to rise.

According to the Wikipedia page, each section in the song is supposed to represent an era of music, so perhaps it's a conscious nod to Gershwin.