Music that Makes you Laugh Out Loud

[Sir Velo]

Classical music is often thought of, generally by those who are ignorant of it, as inherently serious or gloomy. However, to the aficionado much humour can be gleaned from a wide variety of composers. In the sense that a particuarly witty composition or phrase brings a smile to your face or even elicits guffaws at the composer's chutzpah, intended or otherwise, what are the pieces that have you chortling?

For starters, two comic instances of bathos:

"Duetto" from Pulcinella. Love the double bass' attempt to remain serious while the trombone (literally) farts about.
The whole of Dohnanyi's Variations on a Nursery Rhyme. Great send up of Brahms and the whole ernst world of 19th century German symphonic music.

[salymap]

Kodaly Hary Janos makes me smile, if not laugh out loud after knowing it for years.

Also that Haydn Symphony wirh the false endings. Haydn had a wondeful SOH

Does anyone know of a good recording of the Variations on a Nursery TUNE? Used to hear it a lot.

[JFLL]

Those Wagner pastiches (or perhaps abridgements?) by Chabrier -- Souvenirs de Munich, etc..

But certainly NOT Mozart's A Musical Joke (How could he?) Or Rossini's 'The Cat Duet'.

[rauschwerk]

Does anyone know of a good recording of the Variations on a Nursery TUNE? Used to hear it a lot.

Katchen (Decca) is still highly recommendable, though on the reissue I possess they have unwisely boosted the bass and the low notes on the piano sound a bit bizarre. An excellent modern recording is by Howard Shelley (Chandos).

As for laughs: Pianists from Carnival of the Animals is very funny in the right hands, such as Renaud Capuçon and friends who also correctly use a glass armonica in Aquarium.

[amateur51]

Those Wagner pastiches (or perhaps abridgements?) by Chabrier -- Souvenirs de Munich, etc..

But certainly NOT Mozart's A Musical Joke (How could he?) Or Rossini's 'The Cat Duet'.

This version is very special, I think

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d63jKihoYRg

[salymap]

I had very old recordings of the late, great [to me anyway] Cyril and Phyllis playing the Variations on a Nursery Tune and the Carnival of Animals but they seem to have been thrown out. Thanks I must think of replacing them.

Something musical to laugh at, or with, is always good at the moment

[Serial_Apologist]

Stravinsky's attempts at "jazz" in The Soldier's Tale seem funny - the way the music proceeds jerkily, stops, starts again then incongruously changes direction as if bits have acidentally dropped on the floor was probably intended seriously, as a musical equivalent of cubism.

I think Poulenc probably took his cue here, or maybe also from Satie's parallel harmonic and idiomatic inconsequentialities, and not just in Parade. The first time I heard Les Biches I just roared with laughter at every idiomatic turn, the way a poorly executed quote from The Soldier's Tale could then be repeated as if Mozart had composed it, the clumsy misquote from Franck's D minor symphony in the second movement's opening theme. I guess it's all dependent on timing and subtlety - Les Facheux, by Georges Auric, another of Les Six from that time careers around like a drunken clown and soon exhausts like an inebriated party bore, while Ibert's Divertissement overplays the bull in a china shop manner similarly.

But to appreciate such humour seems to require a degree of musical literacy: would someone unconversant with the legacy not hear Les Biches in a literal way??? It's always more complex than the much-vaunted instantaneity of humour implies: cultural mediators inevitably get in the way. To appreciate Hindemith's incongruous intrusions of Tristanian chromatic hyperbole in Cardillac maybe one has to identify with the German cultural underground's antipathy to anything felt redolent of nazism as the Weimar Republic crumbled and cultural icons were being smashed - and a similar if even harder act of identification is needed to appreciate the humour in Shostakovitch's The Nose, Lady Macbeth, the Age of Gold and concerto for piano and trumpet, from a slightly later period under regime conditions it's hard to imagine oneself living under. Not only that - humour has strong national characteristics, as even the most internationalistically/multiculturally-inclined of us have to acknowledge in our often embarrassingly misguided momentary presumptions...

One modern composer many would consider entirely lacking in a gsoh might be Schoenberg; the Monn reconstruction listed as AS's Cello Concerto is imv as hilarious in its reconstruction as if by Brahms or Reger, had they lived long enough as in respecting of the handiwork of its originator, always has friends who have never heard it aghast when one tells them. But to those who then say, hmmm, hardly characteristic of the oeuvre as a whole I would direct them to the humour of parts of Pierrot Lunaire which would have been inconceivable in the post-Straussian vocabulary of even the First Chamber Symphony, and how the nursery rhyme-like tunes in the middle of the 12-tone row-based Serenade, somehow absolved of cutesiness and restored to innocence, can raise a smile.

It's funny (peculiar) isn't it that humour, that most instantaneous and potentially bonding response, is the hardest to pin down, and, for that very reason, defend. How we once laughed at Benny Hill...

[Bryn]

This never fails to bring at least a smile to my face.

[Petrushka]

Haydn's Symphony No 90, as salymap pointed out above, is a 200 year old joke that never goes stale especially when heard live. Also several of the descriptive polkas from the Strauss family have highly amusing moments. Surprised no-one has mentioned the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra and the orchestral laughter that greets the Shostakovich Leningrad or Lehar Merry Widow quote in the fourth movement.

However, the one piece that causes me more laughs than any other is Richard Strauss' Don Quixote. Norman del Mar's biography was absolutely vital to me in being able to match up what is happening in the orchestra with the episodes in Cervantes' book. Armed with this information you can appreciate the many touches of humour indulged in by Strauss. There's pathos too, of course, but comedy and pathos are never far apart.

[Roehre]

Stravinsky's attempts at "jazz" in The Soldier's Tale seem funny - the way the music proceeds jerkily, stops, starts again then incongruously changes direction as if bits have acidentally dropped on the floor was probably intended seriously, as a musical equivalent of cubism.

I think Poulenc probably took his cue here, or maybe also from Satie's parallel harmonic and idiomatic inconsequentialities, and not just in Parade. The first time I heard Les Biches I just roared with laughter at every idiomatic turn, the way a poorly executed quote from The Soldier's Tale could then be repeated as if Mozart had composed it, the clumsy misquote from Franck's D minor symphony in the second movement's opening theme. I guess it's all dependent on timing and subtlety - Les Facheux, by Georges Auric, another of Les Six from that time careers around like a drunken clown and soon exhausts like an inebriated party bore, while Ibert's Divertissement overplays the bull in a china shop manner similarly.

But to appreciate such humour seems to require a degree of musical literacy: would someone unconversant with the legacy not hear Les Biches in a literal way??? It's always more complex than the much-vaunted instantaneity of humour implies: cultural mediators inevitably get in the way. To appreciate Hindemith's incongruous intrusions of Tristanian chromatic hyperbole in Cardillac maybe one has to identify with the German cultural underground's antipathy to anything felt redolent of nazism as the Weimar Republic crumbled and cultural icons were being smashed - and a similar if even harder act of identification is needed to appreciate the humour in Shostakovitch's The Nose, Lady Macbeth, the Age of Gold and concerto for piano and trumpet, from a slightly later period under regime conditions it's hard to imagine oneself living under. Not only that - humour has strong national characteristics, as even the most internationalistically/multiculturally-inclined of us have to acknowledge in our often embarrassingly misguided momentary presumptions...

One modern composer many would consider entirely lacking in a gsoh might be Schoenberg; the Monn reconstruction listed as AS's Cello Concerto is imv as hilarious in its reconstruction as if by Brahms or Reger, had they lived long enough as in respecting of the handiwork of its originator, always has friends who have never heard it aghast when one tells them. But to those who then say, hmmm, hardly characteristic of the oeuvre as a whole I would direct them to the humour of parts of Pierrot Lunaire which would have been inconceivable in the post-Straussian vocabulary of even the First Chamber Symphony, and how the nursery rhyme-like tunes in the middle of the 12-tone row-based Serenade, somehow absolved of cutesiness and restored to innocence, can raise a smile.

It's funny (peculiar) isn't it that humour, that most instantaneous and potentially bonding response, is the hardest to pin down, and, for that very reason, defend. How we once laughed at Benny Hill...

[Sir Velo]

That arch prankster, Gyorgy Ligeti, can always be relied upon to provide an antidote to doom and gloom, as here in his mischievous send up of the gestures of grand opera; Aventures. The ideal tonic for anyone with an aversion to warbling sopranos and trembling tenors.

[Roehre]

A piece that magnifies the gestures of opera (and grand more specifially) and which always gets me in a laugh is Boris Blacher's "Abstrakte Oper nr.1".

Already mentioned, but definitely containing very humourous passages, is Strauss' Don Quijote. But Till Eulenspiegel shouldn't be forgotten here either. A string quartet with a whole series of very tasteful and upbeat parodies is Hindemith's Minimax - Repertorium für Streichquartett.

Schönberg's string quartet no.2 has a brilliant sarcasm/parody with the trio of the scherzo: O du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin.

Stravinsky's Circus Polka is a joke in itself, but especially with parodying Schubert's march militaire at its very end

Raff's 4th symphony contains a brilliant joke: the finale starts with music from the beginning of the first movement. But after approximately 30 seconds Beethoven sets in: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne.

[Hornspieler]

"Pianists" from Carnival des Animaux.

I've heard so many piano duettists who sound just like that

HS

[Roehre]

"Pianists" from Carnival des Animaux.

I've heard so many piano duettists who sound just like that

HS

[Keraulophone]

"Sugar Plums" From the 1958 Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival (RFH) - particularly the Tchaik 4 motto - (...along with most of the rest in those original Hoffnung concerts).

From the description on YouTube:

These are excerpts from Tchaikovsky's 4th and 6th Symphonies and "1812 Overture," as realised by Elizabeth Poston, organ, and the Dolmetsch Ensemble. Specialists in 16th century music and consisting of just a handful of players on recorders, viols and harpsichord, they turn their attention to symphonic music which has for far too long been the preserve of large orchestras. As the LP note says: "To hear the great moments in Tchaikovsky though what would have been regarded as the wrong end of the telescope adds a new perspective to one's appreciation of the composer's genius." It should be noted that in the finale, childrens' pop-guns were substituted for the military cannon required for the "1812 Overture."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9XadihIPYg