"From the Sun to the World"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I finally (FINALLY!) got around to looking into "From the Sun to the World" to look at the resemblance between it and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which almost two months ago I said I was going to do.

I looked up the Moonlight Sonata on Wikipedia, and I learned how to play (rather poorly) the first three measures:

The beginning of "From the Sun to the World" resembles this only slightly.  As far as I've figured it out, it also has octaves in the left hand and arpeggiated chords in the right.  (Although there's also a second part, which was probably overdubbed, that has descending arpeggiations of the same chords, using different inversions after each group of three notes.)

The octaves in "Moonlight Sonata" descend diatonically (C#, B, A) before going to F# and then ascending to G#.  The octaves in "From the Sun to the World" are much simpler.  For the first two chords, it's A.  Then it drops to E before returning to A.

The first three measures of the Moonlight Sonata arpeggiate C# minor, A major, and D major, and the arpeggiated chords in "From the Sun to the World" don't really resemble these at all.  I'm fairly certain that it's A minor, D minor, E major, A minor.

So, as far as the parts, there's some resemblance, but there isn't much in common note-wise.