Would you say that this musical phrase sounds too similar to this other musical phrase?

Disclaimer: I’m not a musician. However, I’ve been an attentive audience for classical music since I was three.

Short answer: yes.

I hear the difference, but to me they are so close that I would have to call yours overly derivative. If I were familiar with the Bach work, I’d know immediately that the other phrase was an echo of it, and I’d call it too close for comfort.

“Too close for comfort,” by the way, was the best I could get out of a company’s legal department when I asked what standard we should use in deciding which of our technical glossary definitions had to be rewritten to avoid a charge of plagiarism from our competitors.

It’s as if I were to ask you if you considered this line to be sufficiently original that I could call it my own: “To see or not to see: that is the problem.”

However, I do know that there’s such a thing as homage in the arts, as well as quotation, not to mention pastiches such as P.D.Q. Bach’s. If you meant it to be recognized and understood as an allusion to the Bach piece, well, I think it would be to anyone who knows the source.

Thank you. I have to say that I agree with you.

I’ve already rewritten the whole thing. I took the “F# D F# B” and changed most everything else, so it doesn’t sound at all the same.

Here is the newest thing.

I think it sounds too similar because it has the same rhythm and the same up-and-down-yet-still-ascending-upwards flow. But I don’t study classical music and I am not a musician, either.

From a music theory perspective, the first two are nearly identical. If one were to perform a Schenkerian analysis on the two phrases, for example, one would probably get the same result for each. Schenkerian analysis is somewhat subjective, so this is not guaranteed. Nevertheless, I doubt there would be much variation between any two analyses of the passages. In any case, the two phrases occupy the exact same tonal space. If you told me that they came from the same piece, I would not be at all surprised.

As @Jeruba notes, this is not necessarily a problem. Homage and quotation are not uncommon, and have even been used to great effect (e.g., in the work of Charles Ives). If you want to write a piece in the style of Bach, there’s nothing wrong with including a few phrases that sound as if they could have been lifted right out of one of his works. This is especially true if you make the homage explicit. That said, I find the modified phrase much more interesting—not least because it is more rhythmically exciting.