A couple of weeks ago, my friend Jacob sent me a link to this mashup:
I could tell it was a mashup because the strings in the background sound fairly contemporary, while the vocals seem like they are from the 1960s or before. However, I wasn't familiar with either of the source tracks. After doing a bit of internet research, I discovered that this particular mashup was used in the movie Shutter Island. This means that it was probably (a) professionally produced and (b) made legally. While I can't prove the latter, the former does turn out to be true: composer/producer Max Richter (who also composed the string piece six years earlier) mashed these two pieces together for the movie. Richter's original instrumental piece is called On the Nature of Daylight, and it was released in 2004. It has been used in its instrumental form in several films, too. Here is that version:
This piece consists of a repeated chord pattern, where each chord lasts for one 4/4 measure:
Bbm Fm Db Gb
Bbm Ab Db Gb
This is essentially a four-bar progression, with A-flat major taking the place of F minor the second time around. It is heard as being in B-flat minor, and it develops in the style of Arvo Pärt, with a solo violin playing a simple, lyrical melody. The texture thickens gradually as more instruments play solo lines in counterpoint with the violin. There is a rather quick tapering off at the end, and the piece concludes with a tonic triad.
The vocals from the mashup belong to Dinah Washington, from her 1960 hit, "This Bitter Earth." Their original context can be heard here:
This song is in D-flat major, and features jazz piano, drums, bass, a string orchestra, and a chorus of "ooh"s. The vocals are left untransposed for the mashup, recontextualizing them in the relative minor key. Because of this relative key relationship, there is a significant amount of overlap between Richter's piece and the original harmonies used in Washington's song. The latter features more harmonic variety, but all of the chords from On the Nature of Daylight (except F minor) are also used in "This Bitter Earth." The way Richter makes Washington's vocals fit over his piece, then, is by changing her phrasing. I will demonstrate this technique by looking at the following lines:
This bitter earth: Well, what fruit it bears!
What good is love that no one shares?
And if my life is like the dust that hides the glow of rose,
What good am I? Heaven only knows.
In their original context, these lyrics take sixteen measures to sing; there is a hypermetrical grouping of four measures. The word "earth" occurs on the first downbeat in a four-measure group. Though there are rests in this passage, at least one word occurs in every measure. The mashup takes seventeen bars to get through the same amount of text, but there are several significant changes. Most notably, the word "earth" loses its emphasis because it no longer occurs on a downbeat. In fact, it occurs in the middle of the fourth measure of a four-bar hypermetrical group, which drastically minimizes its importance. There are no words at all in the subsequently accented measure. There are actually six vocally empty measures in all during this section of the mashup. Richter has also completely deleted the line, "What good is love that no one shares?" and repeats "This bitter earth," a second time instead. The result is a song with much more empty space than the original, which perhaps leads to some of the YouTube comments about sadness and heartbreak. I applaud Richter's technique!