Now, as an admirer of turn of the century marches (read: Sousa), I’d have to vote for Stars & Stripes Forever! as a widely recognized tune since shortly after 1896.

There isn’t a high school marching band, symphony, youth symphony, musician or audience member (parents, siblings) the world over that hasn’t heard this tune and would not instantly recognize it, though perhaps the raw number would be less than the above-mentioned children’s songs, although it is also considered a popular children’s song. And, while it does have lyrics, I’d wager that only a handful of people know that it has lyrics, much less what those original lyrics are. More people likely know Be Kind to Your Web Footed Friends as the “real” lyrics to the tune.

Almost everyone in the developed world has heard that tune and would instantly reconize it

Silent Night/Stille Nacht?
Bonus for being great in both English and the original German.
Thinking multilingually there may be some nursery rhymes that cross the language barrier such as Frere Jacke.

Perhaps some religious Christian tunes or hymns would be widely recognised.
It is hard to imagine anything better known than Happy Birthday which makes it all the more pathetic to think people still claim copyright on a song which should rightly belong to our shared collective memory and culture.

Then again if it is the tune that interests you as opposed to the lyrics then it becomes a lot more complicated and would require quite a bit of musical knowledge to realise which simple traditional songs share the same basic tune, cumulatively they might just be able to beat out Happy Birthday. Know any music scholars?

1) Take historical world population figures from, say 1700 to the present, at even intervals, say every 50 years or so.

2) Model that data with some nice continuous function, exponential, a quartic, something monotonic, with a good fit. We’re not making any grand theories of human demographics, just looking for something that we can reasonably work with. Let the curve be p(t).

3)Estimate the recognizability of each tune at a given time r(t). This would typically not be continuous. For “Yesterday” r(t)=0 before 1965 and maybe increases to 50% by 1980 where it remains constant. Pure speculation at this point, but speculation we can base on some reasoning.

4) Calculate a integral of p(t)*r(t) over the entire time interval.

We’re ignoring here the impact of increasing human lifespans. The longer the lifespan the fewer unique people alive in a given timespan at a given population count. But this should only be a 20% or so factor over this time period.

Honestly, given the front-loading effect of population growth and mass communication, I doubt that “Happy Birthday” has any real competition. (I was just in Beijing, and at a restaurant with no other Westerners and not even a badly translated English menu I witnessed a group of waiters singing the song, in English, to a tableful of adult Chinese.) See also the Wikipedia article on Happy Birthday, which quotes some numbers from Guinness on how widely transcribed this song is.

Rob,
please…

The notorious Nokia tune, right?

But did you know: “The tune is an excerpt of a few bars from Francisco Tárrega’s Gran Vals”?

And by saying “recognized” I’m meaning something less than “identified.” So if you hear Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and can say, “Yes, I recognize that tune” then it passes, even if you cannot gives the name or composer.

Both ” REL=”nofollow”>Tárrega (1852-1909) and his Gran Vals are unknown to a larger audience.

Wikipedia Quote: “He is also the composer of what has been claimed to be “probably the world’s most heard tune”: the Nokia ringtone Nokia tune or simply Nokia, also used in their advertising spots, is based on Tárrega’s Gran Vals.

//Andre

There have certainly been partial tunes, even just a bass line that have carried far. For example, there was the “La Spagna” bass that showed up all over the place in the 15th century. Everyone seemed to want to blend it into their music and we have hundreds of examples where it was used. But if you heard it today, almost no one would it. It has dropped out of our musical vocabulary.

The suggestion that a hymn would have the longevity as well as the geographic reach. How about the one called Old Hundredth?

Another guess: The British national anthem. In the UK the words are “God Save the Queen”, but the same tune is also the American song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”. Its use as Britain’s anthem lead to widespread use throughout their colonies and Commonwealth nations. So I think that gives a significant temporal as well as geographical reach.

If you do weight the numbers, then longevity counts for a lot. But I don’t think we have good records of pre-medieval music.

My answer: the most recognized tune has been forgotten.

Beginning in the sixth century, rising cultural centers in Arabia came in contact with the musical traditions of Byzantium, Persia, and points east. Two hundred years later, Ibn al Munajjim described a system of eight melodic modes, each based on a diatonic scale spanning an octave. This written notation would have further extended Arabic music’s influence. Beginning with the Crusades in the eleventh century, this musical tradition, already rich in theory, would have been introduced to the western world. We see that influence in the name derivation of early instruments, including lute from al-’ud and anafil (the Spanish word for natural trumpet) from naffir.

So, my guess is that much of the world’s musical tradition has grown out of this early system. If any one tune was popular then, perhaps it has persisted through time as a melody that is familiar, if not recognizable.