Birch twigs and a siren

[ardcarp]

Pants. Absolute pants.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think jayne got the pun...

[jayne lee wilson]

I think jayne got the pun...

No I didn't, I'm hopeless at picking them up, as at all word games - crosswords, anagrams, countdown etc....the brain don't work that way...

I could counter that it isn't actually panting of course (try imagining that in the same place...), but then we'd be going from puns to pedants' corner...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well, I was led to ask this question after watching my recording of the 2015 Proms performance of the Nielsen 2nd introduced/narrated by Sir Mark Elder, and sure enough there duly appeared a bunch of birch twigs that edged their way along the drum.

- which just goes to show, I should check my scores: the copy I have is a reprint of an earlier edition, for which the editors of the newest authorised edition of the complete works of Nielsen gave this note

Nielsen’s own copy of the score, which has a number of autograph additions and corrections, formed the main source for the present edition. The printed score is however in many respects problematical. For one thing, it has many printer’s errors, and for another it has many inaccuracies due to Carl Nielsen’s printing manuscript, which is not always clear. Furthermore, Nielsen changed the instrumentation in two passages in the fourth movement after the score had been printed. These changes have never been effectuated in any later printed edition of the score, but they were included in the printed parts, which have thus functioned as a source of corrections for these passages

. You (and Elder) are, of course, absolutely correct: the mere "sordino" of my copy is "footnoted" in the new edition: Sordino here means a small fan-shaped brush of fine birch twigs, which is laid on the edge of the kettledrum spread out over the skin; this produces a slight rustling sound.

[Maclintick]

One of my favourite musical instructions directs a percussionist to strike his drum thus: "frapper avec une baguette où un tampon". I think it appears in Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts - only really amusing to aficionados of Franglais, I suppose...

[Simon B]

I recall Boulez, televised at the Round House/RAH (?), conducting something that required a china teaset to be smashed down onto the platform....

Ligeti is a leading composer of music for smashing crockery... Other pieces have been mentioned upthread but IIRC there's a prominent part in Le Grand Macabre. The trick to getting a decent sound is to hurl it into a metal dustbin that already has pre-broken crockery at the bottom. It is apparently getting harder to source crockery that has the right timbre .

Beyond that the possibilities are almost limitless.

Chains in Gurrelieder. Chains bashed and swished on thundersheets in PMD's Throstles Nest Junction (to produce ghostly evocations of train noises IIRC). A whoopee cushion in... something (possibly by Derek Bourgeois - can't remember). "Revolving Door" is one I recall seeing on an orchestral part tweeted by a percussionist in one of the London orchestras - with a pencilled in "WTF?". "Exploding Rocks" and shotguns in Leifs' Hekla. Then there was the thunder/rocks/? thing the BBC had custom built for the Proms Gothic Symphony - from a 3 foot x 6 foot industrial washing machine barrel filled with rocks. "Pogo cello" (no, I've got no idea either...) in can't-remember-what. Floor polishers and rifles in Arnold's Grand Grand Overture. And so on...

[Jonathan]

Liszt's original version of the Dante Symphony called for a wind machine and a coloured slide projector. He later dismissed these ideas though. Shame, would have made for an interesting addition to the music.

[Pulcinella]

Liszt's original version of the Dante Symphony called for a wind machine and a coloured slide projector. He later dismissed these ideas though. Shame, would have made for an interesting addition to the music.

Might depend on which holiday snaps he was entertaining us with. All those years of wandering around Italy.

[Jonathan]

True!