Dag Wiren’s March from Serenade for Strings (theme starts at 0:34) is one of those pieces that haunt me when I hear it, that I have heard it a long time ago and associated it with something. Then it hit me: in the 1963 movie of Lord of the Flies, the choir boys come marching in singing Kyrie Eleison with a tune that seems to me to strongly resemble the theme from the March. Perhaps needless to say, I know nothing about whatever musical field it would be that could rigorously compare these pieces; it’s mostly the sequences of notes that strike me as similar.
Not being a church-goer, I have never heard Kyrie Eleison in any other context, so I don’t know if there is more than one set of music for it. IMDB says that Raymond Leppard wrote the music for the movie, but I don’t know if that includes this music or if it is a standard church-sung tune.
If what Leppard wrote for the film includes the music for this piece, it seems to me he lifted it heavily from Wiren’s 1937 work, unless they are both based on an earlier piece. What do knowledgeable folks think about this?