I'd like to waffle about music for a while. Specifically, I want to waffle about two particular pieces of music. In the process I will go on at great length, and will also perpetrate two things that I fear would be horrific faux pas in a serious article about music. If you can't cope with any of that, look away now.

My first gaffe will be to commit a complete and utter cliché, by enthusing about Beethoven's Fifth. This will make it sound as if that's the only Beethoven I've heard, and that furthermore I only went and listened to it because everyone talks about it. Well, this is not the case: I have heard a fair amount more Beethoven than that, but the Fifth Symphony, and its first movement in particular, made a much bigger impression on me that any of the rest, for reasons I'll explain below. And, of course, there must be some reason why particular pieces become clichés in that way, and I suspect it's because they actually are very good.

The first movement of the Fifth, of course, starts off with the world-famous ‘Da da da dum’, as immortalised by Ford Prefect and undoubtedly dozens of other people before him. And it continues to go ‘da da da dum’ throughout much of the movement; it noodles about with this one motif, using it over and over again in different structures, and often repeating those structures in turn several times. Occasionally it departs from this to introduce a different motif or melody, noodles with that for a while, and then returns to the good old ‘da da da dum’. So far, this would be nothing terribly remarkable, even for someone who wasn't Beethoven.

Somewhere in the last couple of minutes, things step up a gear. Where the music had previously been noodling about separately with a few different themes, they now begin to come together and show their relevance to one another, much like three or four apparently unrelated plot strands of a novel suddenly revealing their interconnectedness as the story approaches its climax. There's a real sense of ‘oh, I see’, as you suddenly realise why these particular themes were chosen. Then the themes begin to intermix more and more, and become faster and louder and more energetic.

And then it goes completely off the rails. Somehow, through a strange musical alchemy which I find difficult to describe without sounding pretentious or stupid or both, what was previously a fusion of the themes we'd heard through the rest of the movement now shifts sideways to become a completely new melody we haven't heard before at all. In a novel this would be the equivalent of introducing a deus ex machina right at the climax, and would be a terrible disappointment. I suspect it would be a disappointment in music as well, unless it's done just right; in this piece, it is, so that instead of feeling let down we feel fulfilled, as if this new melody is somehow the natural result of mixing together all the previous themes and turning up the heat. This bit still brings tears to my eyes and a tingle to my spine every time I listen to it.

After that triumphant vindication, the piece is pretty much done; it winds back down a little, throws in a last few ‘da da da dums’ just to make sure you still feel at home, and then ends.

The rest of the symphony, and indeed the rest of the Beethoven I've ever heard, doesn't have the same effect on me. There isn't that same thrill as the disparate themes start to merge, or the utter sense of awe and wonder as the merging themes meld and then transform into their unexpected and yet somehow so right conclusion. Other music has a lot of varied emotional effects on me, but this particular one is very rare, and only one other piece has ever given me the same feeling.

Which leads me neatly into my second gaffe, because now I'm going to talk about the other piece that makes me feel the same way, and it is Second Rendez-vous by Jean-Michel Jarre.

It feels utterly wrong to be comparing Beethoven with Jarre at this level. One is the single most legendary composer of the past millennium, the man whose name is practically synonymous with musical High Art, the precise name you invoke when you know you're dealing with a work of lesser worth (‘Well, it's no Beethoven, but I quite like it anyway’). The other is a modern synth artist of (as far as I can tell) dwindling popularity, whose fans among my friends I can count on the fingers of one hand, and who even I will acknowledge probably won't be remembered in a hundred years, while Beethoven will still be going strong.

Well, anyone objecting to this is welcome to rationalise away the enormity of my gaffe as they see fit. They could focus on the fact that I'm talking about one particular piece by each composer, and am saying nothing about the rest of their output. They could decide that since I'm talking about the emotions inspired in me by these particular pieces, I must just be weird and need not affect everyone else's musical opinions. They could point out that Beethoven had much more subtlety and interest in his music in ways that Jarre doesn't, which I'm completely ignoring to focus on this one particular aspect of the pieces in question. They could even hypothesise that the common aspects between the two pieces were something Jarre copied from Beethoven, if they're feeling really zealous. Anyone with a strong desire to continue believing that Beethoven is of vastly greater artistic merit than Jarre is welcome to believe any or all of the above; for all I know, it might all be true.

I don't care, because all I know is that when I listen to Second Rendez-vous it sends the same tingle up my spine as the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth.

It has a very similar structure, with the first three-quarters of the piece repeating some simple motifs again and again. First and foremost among those motifs is an extremely repetitive string figure which underlies at least half of the entire piece. In fact, this particular piece has been known to turn friends of mine off Jarre due to those repetitive strings. It doesn't happen to affect me that way and never has, but listening to it in those terms I can understand why it might.

If you aren't quite so bothered about the repetitiveness, you can listen past the strings for the other motifs being introduced. At least one of them is introduced rather subtly as a bass line while the strings carry on over the top; this struck me as a particularly neat manoeuvre which even Beethoven didn't think of as far as I noticed. (Though I suppose it's possible he thought it was a cheap trick and beneath his dignity, or alternatively that orchestral music didn't have the penetrating bass power needed to make it work but he'd have used it like a shot if he'd had access to Jarre's synthesiser collection; we'll never know.)

And then, near the end, in part 4 (Second Rendez-vous is divided into four ‘parts’ of 2-3 minutes each), the same thing happens that happened in the Fifth Symphony, and it has the same effect. The various themes are introduced to each other, get on like a house on fire, mix together and undergo a vigorous chemical reaction whose products are an entirely new melody and a whole lot of energy. It was only recently, listening to this again, that I felt the usual tingle up my spine and realised what it was reminding me of: it was reminding me of Beethoven's Fifth, during which I feel the same tingle for (I now realise) pretty much the same reason.

Having written all that, I'm not entirely sure how to finish this piece of writing off. It's been washing around in my head for a week or so, ever since I noticed the similarity between the two pieces, and I feel better now I've put it into words; but I feel somehow that there ought to be a concluding paragraph here which makes some vital point, and I don't have one. So I'm just going to apologise again to anyone offended by my above musical gaffes, and then stop.