You’ve heard it a million times…or at least the first line of it. There was a sequence in an old cartoon I haven’t seen in over 20 years – it might have been Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, or The Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, or even Tom and Jerry – but it went like this. The would-be-saboteur sets a bomb inside a piano. The victim reads the sheet music and plays the first line of the song, but keeps hitting the wrong key for the very last note. This is, of course, the key that sets off the bomb. The saboteur, breathlessly awaiting the explosion, gets frustrated at the victim’s lack of piano skills and dashes in to correct him. “No, you idiot! It goes like this!” Boom.
If transcribed into C major, the notes of the opening line are as follows EDCDCCEGFACC.
Oddly, although I’ve always been fully familiar with BMIATEYC (aka “To Celia”), I never noticed before that that’s what was being played there. For some reason I was hearing it in 4/4 time instead of 3/4 :
<rest> <rest> <rest> ED | CDCC | EGFA | CC <fermata?>
And I’m wrong about “To Celia” being the other name for this song. It’s the other name of a totally different song, “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes”.
This same plot device - the last note of a piano tune sets a bomb off - was used in the Goon Show episode China Story, recorded 16 January 1955. It could well have been influenced by the Bugs Bunny cartoon above, as Spike Milligan was a known cartoon fan; the character of Eccles was inspired by Goofy for instance.