What’s in a name?

[Beef Oven!]

Currently listening to Rautavaara’s string quintet, "Les Cieux Inconnues" (Unknown Heavens) and I really don’t know why, but the subtitle irritated me!
Is it gratuitous, cynical? Will it add undeserving interest? Ok, I’m obviously in miserablist mode!

Things were so much better in the old days. An 'Emperor here', a 'fantastique' there, a sole ' Inextinguishable' - all appropriate and sensible. I can even tolerate the three farts and a raspberry merchants with their, 'differences', ‘connotations', 'correspondences', 'face-flannel for large ensemble' and 'flatulations for orchestra and tape'.

But then came the 'symphonies of barrowful songs’, 'a schmuck descends into the hexagonal garden’ which then, it seems, gave licence to the marketing boys to take it to the nth degree.

Do we really need these names?

Does anyone have a favourite, real or made up?

[LeMartinPecheur]

Hellawell's Sound Carvings from the Ice Wall comes to mind, both for its title and one of the most flatulent concert programme-notes I've ever seen. So marvellous that I kept my copy for posterity The actual notes haven't done a lot for me either, despite buying a recording (because it was literally pennies in a shop 'bin').

In view of this, I was not greatly thrilled when the Schubert Ensemble brought a more recent work of his - A Building of Curves for piano quartet - to their recent Truro concert. But actually, it was very impressive!

[Richard Barrett]

I agree that titles can make the music sound highly pretentious, especially if for no apparent reason they're in a language the composer doesn't speak, and the longer they are the more pretentious they sound, in general, but for the rest I'm not really getting your drift. If in a parallel universe Beethoven hadn't existed and someone came along in 2016 and gave a piece the title "Emperor" or "Archduke" that would seem very silly indeed. "Do we need these names"? They do make it easier to refer to pieces and to remember which one you're talking about.

[Richard Tarleton]

Does anyone have a favourite, real or made up?

I was at the first performance of David Bedford's "Star Clusters, Nebulae and Places in Devon", in 1972. My younger self did not enjoy it, indeed was quite disobliging about it, and I haven't heard it since. I can't remember the main reason for going to that concert. Bedford came onto the stage on crutches with his leg in plaster to receive applause.

[vinteuil]

.

... I just think it sad that concert promoters and record producers have a lame tendency to promote Haydn symphonies that happen to have a name in preference to those that don't. There is of course something lovely in all Haydn symphonies; there is not necessarily any more intrinsic merit in those which have more or less by accident acquired nick-names.

[Richard Barrett]

Bedford came onto the stage on crutches with his leg in plaster to receive applause.

That explains everything.

[teamsaint]

one I like, don't know why really, just do.

"From me flows what you call time." Takemitsu,

and since we touched on the area of pretentious, I rather liked,
" Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms: Some people think it's fun to entertain" by China Crisis, although it is a bit pretentious, and silly.

[ahinton]

Currently listening to Rautavaara’s string quintet, "Les Cieux Inconnues" (Unknown Heavens) and I really don’t know why, but the subtitle irritated me!
Is it gratuitous, cynical? Will it add undeserving interest? Ok, I’m obviously in miserablist mode!

Things were so much better in the old days. An 'Emperor here', a 'fantastique' there, a sole ' Inextinguishable' - all appropriate and sensible. I can even tolerate the three farts and a raspberry merchants with their, 'differences', ‘connotations', 'correspondences', 'face-flannel for large ensemble' and 'flatulations for orchestra and tape'.

But then came the 'symphonies of barrowful songs’, 'a schmuck descends into the hexagonal garden’ which then, it seems, gave licence to the marketing boys to take it to the nth degree.

Do we really need these names?

Does anyone have a favourite, real or made up?

Nicely put - and something that wll, I'm sure, draw forth all manner of examples.

The American Mortician has several from which to choose, for example:

In Search of an Orchestration

False Relationships and the Extended Ending

On Time and the Instrumental Factor

Half a Minute It's All I've Time For
of which the last might be thought by some to represent a cutback by BBC of Just a Minute.

Satie has his fair share, of course and one of his large collection of umbrellas might have come in useful at a performance of the 15th of Chopin's 24 Préludes.

Performance directions can equally raise similar questions; consider, for example, the title "Il gallo d'oro" da Rimsky-Korsakov: variazioni frivole con una fuga anarchica, eretica e perversa, Sorabji's final set of variations for piano, in whose score Var. 10 is headed "Valse impertinente: con la grazia elefantina d'un'orchestra inglese suonante un Valzer di Strauss - Pesante e parodisticamente, molto esagerato", one passage in which carries the direction "Nello stile della canaglia democratica, vulgarmente e pesante" and whose Var. 28 should be played "come une macchina da cucire".

Anyway, love the face-flannel, the barrowful songs and the schmuck!

[Pianoman]

one I like, don't know why really, just do.

"From me flows what you call time." Takemitsu,

and since we touched on the area of pretentious, I rather liked,
" Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms: Some people think it's fun to entertain" by China Crisis, although it is a bit pretentious, and silly.

As you mention Takemitsu, my favourite has to be '..and then I knew t'was wind' which I always think about after certain meals..

[vinteuil]

.

... sometimes the detail of a title can be helpful - I think of Hindemith :

"Ouvertüre zum „Fliegenden Holländer“, wie sie eine schlechte Kurkapelle morgens um 7 am Brunnen vom Blatt spielt "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouvert%C3%BCre_zum_%22Fliegenden_Holl%C3%A4nder%22,_wie_sie_eine_schlechte_Kurkapelle_morgens_um_7_am_Brunnen_vom_Blatt_spielt

[ahinton]

Funeral march on the death of a parrot.

[EdgeleyRob]

Segerstam Symphonies have great titles

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_symphonies_by_Leif_Segerstam

[EdgeleyRob]

Funeral march on the death of a parrot.

Oh yes Alkan of course

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Funeral march on the death of a parrot.

Reminds me of Gray's Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes.

[MrGongGong]

"The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China"

Is a cracking name
As is

"Three clarinets, cello and piano" (the "Ronseal" approach)