Yesterday afternoon, I had a song stuck in my head, which was the Billie Holiday recording of I’ll Be Seeing You. I knew it was in my head, though, because of it being featured in a movie or TV show — I could tell from the way it was running through my head that it wasn’t because of my familiarity with the original recording. But I wasn’t sure what it was from, so I turned to a quick web search.¹

I quickly turned it up: The answer was Severance (which I heartily recommend). In pulling up that answer, I was on the Wikipedia page for the song, where there is (at time of writing) a mention of a musical connection between it and the 6th movement of Mahler 3.

So for those who haven’t the pleasure of making this discovery yourself, the Billie Holiday recording from the outset of the first verse aligns with the theme in Mahler 3:VI² as early as the first minute. Other fragments come back around later on. I’d love the article cited on the Wikipedia page if anyone has it.

This post is basically just a longer exposition of a single sentence from a Wikipedia article, but I thought it was pretty neat and wanted to highlight it. Were you going to visit that Wikipedia article this week?