Sunday, March 27, 2005
I borrow this terrific book from the library: [Nicolas] Slonimsky's Book of Musical Anecdotes. I quote some of the entries here for your pleasure.
* * *
BISEXUAL ORGANIST
The Music Committee for London schools advertised for "a candidate as organist and music teacher." One of the replies came in the following letter:
"Gentlemen, I noticed your advertisement for an organist and music teacher, either lady or gentleman. Having been both for several years, I offer you my services."
* * *
THE REVERSE OF THE OPPOSITE
Among orchestral musicians notorious for their reverse English, a certain radio conductor occupies a special niche of honour. Here are some of his more brilliant malapropisms:
"If you don't know what I'm talking about, write it down."
"Take a pencil and put a cross around it."
"If I would tell you the truth, I would be a hypocrite."
"Play as I tell you and everything will be topsy-turvy."
"You are playing the reverse of the opposite."
When at a rehearsal he could not get the right tempo, he finally proposed to the orchestra: "I know what! I will conduct a little slower, you play a little faster, and we'll hit it exactly right."
And once he announced to the players that he felt so nervous "they had to give me an epidemic in the arm."
* * *
THE OBSTREPEROUS HARMONIUM
In a small church at a little village near Brighton where the congregation could not afford to pay an organist, they recently bought a self-acting organ, a compact instrument well-suited to the purpose and constructed to play forty different tunes. The sexton had instructions how to set it going and how to stop it; but unfortunately he forgot the latter part of his business. After singing the first four verses of a hymn before a sermon, the organ could not be stopped, and it continued playing two verses more. Then just as the clergyman completed the words, "Let us pray", the organ clicked and started a fresh tune. The minister sat it out patiently. When he renewed his introductory words, "Let us pray", the organ went off again and started another tune. The sexton and others continued their exertions to find the spring, but no man could put a stop to it. They got four of the stoutest men in the church to shoulder the perverse instrument, and they carried it out down the centre aisle of the church, playing away, into the churchyard where it continued clicking and playing until the entire forty tunes were finished.
* * *
MUSICAL CRITICISM - PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT
Some pointed reviews that are as definite as they are brief:
"Mr X conducted Brahms' First Symphony. Brahms lost."
"Miss Y gave a song recital last night. Why?"
"The orchestra men can play Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in their sleep, and very often do."
There was a review by Irving Kolodin which noted that Korngold's Violin Concerto had more corn than gold; and there was a remark of an anonymous critic that a performance of Chopin's Minute Waltz gave the listeners a bad quarter of an hour.
When a baker, who was also an amateur musician, published a song, a waggish music critic described it as a "yeaster-hymn; it begins with 'dough', rises rapidly, but soon falls flat."
Eugene d'Albert, asked to give his opinion of a new piano concerto by a mediocre German composer, Max Vogrich, examined the manuscript carefully and returned it with this comment: "The ink and paper are excellent."
Some pointed reviews are more brief than definite:
Reviewing a Paderewski concert, a music critic waxed enthusiastic about Paderewski's pedalling. "At the hands of Paderewski," he wrote, "the pedal becomes a thing of singular beauty."
Often a misprint combined with a dubious metaphor results in a comic image. A Boston critic opined that Josef Hofmann was a pianist of but a single facet. His review came out this way in print: "Hofmann is an artist of but a single faucet, but what a faucet!"
One critic noted that a certain musician was blowing "his horn with his tongue in his cheek" - an extraordinary trick for any brass player to perform.
The pianist Rosenthal once looked over the manuscript of a piano concerto which had been submitted to him by a friend and displayed great agitation. "It is extraordinary," he kept repeating. "Just imagine! The whole first movement hasn't a single solitary theme in it. Nobody has ever achieved so much sound with so little essence!"
* * *
RIMSKY, ARRANGED BY KORSAKOV
An apprentice radio announcer in charge of broadcasting recorded music announced a Stokowski arrangement of Bach's Toccata as composed by Mr Bach Stokowski. The music supervisor of the station explained to him that when there are double names, the first is the composer and the second the arranger. The next time when Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" was broadcast, the announcer introduced it as a piece by Rimsky, arranged by Korsakov.
* * *
HALF AN OCTAVE DOWN
Studio engineers at radio stations are notoriously lacking in musical knowledge. During a rehearsal of a string ensemble, the radio engineer told the conductor that the violins sounded too high for good transmission.
"Okay," said the conductor, "I'll have them play an octave lower."
"Half an octave will be enough," replied the engineer.
* * *
MUSICAL DEFINITIONS
The following are actual quotations from school papers:
"Wagner was born in the year 1813, supposedly on his birthday."
"Mandolins are high officials in China."
"The correct way to find the key to a piece of music is to use a pitch fork."
"A sound vibration can only be heard when it makes a noise."
"There are many Russian composers who are radically different, only I can't spell their names."
"Sibelius is a nationalist. He is Polish through and through."
"Beethoven's wife and children were always quarrelling, and made him all the deafer."
"Libretto was an Italian who wrote 'Tannhauser'."
"An interval in music is the distance from one piano to the next."
"Syncopation is emphasis on a note that is not in the piece."
"Contralto is a low sort of music that only ladies sing."
"Vibrations are osculation to and fro."
"In conducting, only the down beat should be struck downward."
"Beethoven wrote three symphonies: the First, the Fifth and the Ninth."
"Bach was the master of the fudge, also the feud."
"A bassoon in one-eight Negro."
"Robinson Caruso was a great singer who lived on an island."
"An oboe is a sort of transient or tramp."
"The best cello players are those with bow legs."
"Folk music is coloured people singing what they thought about their parents."
* * *
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
The following programme would certainly puzzle the most authoritative musicologist:
Overture to "Rienzi" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cartwright
Les Preludes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flour
Invitation to the Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weaver
Scherzo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Son-of-Mendel
Largo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trade
Air on the G String . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stream
Blue Danube Waltz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ostrich
Die Moldau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sour Milk
Egmont Overture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beet Gardens
Such billing would ensue if the conductor would translate not only the titles of the pieces by the names of the composers.
Wagner would become Wagoner, or Cartwright.
Liszt means flour in Hungarian.
Weber is Weaver.
Mendelssohn is Mendel's son - hence the double S in the name.
Händel in German is the plural of the word Handel which means trade or business.
Bach is Stream (German writers speak of Bach as the fountainhead of the mighty stream of music).
Strauss means either ostrich or a bouquet of flowers.
Smetana is sour milk.
As to Beethoven, whose grandfather was born in Holland, the Beet in the name is identical with the English word Beet, and Hoven is the plural of the Dutch word for garden, similar to the German word Hof. Beethoven, consequently, is Beet Gardens. A conscientious biographer ought to investigate whether Beethoven liked beet soup, and whether he ever cultivated a beet patch.
* * *
POLYTONAL MUSIC LORE
George Bernard Shaw is critical of the piano as a musical instrument. As long ago as 1894, he wrote in the Fortnightly Review that "time will come when we shall regard the piano as an execrable, jangling, banging, mistuned nuisance."
The celebrated Cardinal Newman cared little for music. In his treatise, The Idea of a University, he opined: "Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education."
Jerome Kern declared in an interview that he got his best melodies from bird calls during his stay at the Austin Ornithological Research Station. The most melodic bird in his estimation is Melospiza Melodia.
The following advertisement appeared in the Fremont, Ohio, News-Messenger in 1947: "Help wanted: Base vile player to play with small orchestra."
Wagner did not like the saxophone. He said it "sounds like the word Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge."
Mascagni, who was sceptical about the average intelligence of a tenor, used to say that there are three degrees of comparison in the Italian language: Stupido, Stupidissimo and Tenore.
"Brahms - what a pianist! One of ten thumbs!" - Philip Hale.
"Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned." - George Bernard Shaw.
"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating and singularly harmonious." - Baudelaire.
"A true music lover is one who on hearing a blonde soprano singing in the bathtub puts his ear to the keyhole." - Anon.
"The opera house is an institution differing from other lunatic asylums only in the fact that its inmates have avoided official certification." - Ernest Newman.
"Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." - John Philip Sousa.
"Music is neither secular nor religious. It can at best suggest the beating of the pulse, the rhythm of the blood that accompanies a given order of ideas." - Henry Noel Brailsford.
"Listen to music religiously as if it were the last strain you might hear." - Henry David Thoreau.
"Music is the only divine art we are promised in heaven, and it is certainly the only divine art with which we are tortured on earth." - Mrs John Lane.
"Music is a kind of counting performed by the mind without knowing that it is counting." - GW Leibniz.
"Music helps not the toothache" - George Herbert.
"Music softens, and often rubs out, the cares of the day." - William Feather.
"If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation." - Oscar Wilde.
"What classic opera needs to succeed in the United States is a hero who can tell the heroine "I love you" in less than twenty minutes." - Alexander Smallens.
"Beware of the person who says he never goes to concerts because the people, the hall, et cetera; prevent him from enjoying the music: he is first cousin to the numerous family of those who 'have no time for reading', the truth being that music bores him - though he dares not say so." - Edward Sackville-West.
"The musician who invented ought to." - O.O. McIntyre
"Musick and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is." - Samuel Pepys.
"An old millionaire had waited a long time for his daughters to get ready for a concert. Finally, he shouted upstairs: 'What a time you girls take! Look at me - a bit of cotton in each ear, and I'm ready.'" - David Bispham.
"Music is essentially useless, as life is." - George Santayana.
"What I love best about music are the women who listen to it." - Jules de Goncourt.
"Nothing is capable of being well set to music is not nonsense." - Joseph Addison.
"Of bestial howling and entirely frantic vomiting up of hopelessly damned souls through their still carnal throats, I have heard more than, please God, I will ever endure the hearing of again in one of His summers." - Ruskin (upon hearing a secular cantata)
"Chloroform, they say, will raise the voice and increase the volume of it. The hearer should take it with the singer." - Philip Hale.
"Nothing is wrong when done to music." - Jerome Kern.
"The different between a good and bad conductor is that one has the score in his head, and the other has his head in the score." - F. H. Cowen (often misattributed to Hans von Bulow)
"When I was young, I was only the son of Moses Mendelssohn the philosopher, and now that I am old, I am only the father of Felix Mendelssohn." - Abraham Mendelssohn.
"Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay." - Attributed to Dumas
"I know only two tunes: one if Yankee Doodle, and other isn't." - U. S. Grant
"Discords make the sweet airs." - George Gershwin.
"Music critics are the Tin Ear Brigade." - Jerome Kern
"A love song is just a caress set to music." - Sigmund Romberg
"Nightingales sing badly." - Jean Cocteau
"The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches." - Jean Cocteau
"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee." - Jean Cocteau
"This birdman, this scarecrow - it's the conductor." - Jean Cocteau
"What is folklore? I am folklore." - Villa-Lobos.
"A singer is somebody who insists on giving Silent Night at the top of his voice." - Boston Globe (December 20, 1947)
¶ 3/27/2005 11:31:00 pm * * *
BISEXUAL ORGANIST
The Music Committee for London schools advertised for "a candidate as organist and music teacher." One of the replies came in the following letter:
"Gentlemen, I noticed your advertisement for an organist and music teacher, either lady or gentleman. Having been both for several years, I offer you my services."
* * *
THE REVERSE OF THE OPPOSITE
Among orchestral musicians notorious for their reverse English, a certain radio conductor occupies a special niche of honour. Here are some of his more brilliant malapropisms:
"If you don't know what I'm talking about, write it down."
"Take a pencil and put a cross around it."
"If I would tell you the truth, I would be a hypocrite."
"Play as I tell you and everything will be topsy-turvy."
"You are playing the reverse of the opposite."
When at a rehearsal he could not get the right tempo, he finally proposed to the orchestra: "I know what! I will conduct a little slower, you play a little faster, and we'll hit it exactly right."
And once he announced to the players that he felt so nervous "they had to give me an epidemic in the arm."
* * *
THE OBSTREPEROUS HARMONIUM
In a small church at a little village near Brighton where the congregation could not afford to pay an organist, they recently bought a self-acting organ, a compact instrument well-suited to the purpose and constructed to play forty different tunes. The sexton had instructions how to set it going and how to stop it; but unfortunately he forgot the latter part of his business. After singing the first four verses of a hymn before a sermon, the organ could not be stopped, and it continued playing two verses more. Then just as the clergyman completed the words, "Let us pray", the organ clicked and started a fresh tune. The minister sat it out patiently. When he renewed his introductory words, "Let us pray", the organ went off again and started another tune. The sexton and others continued their exertions to find the spring, but no man could put a stop to it. They got four of the stoutest men in the church to shoulder the perverse instrument, and they carried it out down the centre aisle of the church, playing away, into the churchyard where it continued clicking and playing until the entire forty tunes were finished.
* * *
MUSICAL CRITICISM - PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT
Some pointed reviews that are as definite as they are brief:
"Mr X conducted Brahms' First Symphony. Brahms lost."
"Miss Y gave a song recital last night. Why?"
"The orchestra men can play Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in their sleep, and very often do."
There was a review by Irving Kolodin which noted that Korngold's Violin Concerto had more corn than gold; and there was a remark of an anonymous critic that a performance of Chopin's Minute Waltz gave the listeners a bad quarter of an hour.
When a baker, who was also an amateur musician, published a song, a waggish music critic described it as a "yeaster-hymn; it begins with 'dough', rises rapidly, but soon falls flat."
Eugene d'Albert, asked to give his opinion of a new piano concerto by a mediocre German composer, Max Vogrich, examined the manuscript carefully and returned it with this comment: "The ink and paper are excellent."
Some pointed reviews are more brief than definite:
Reviewing a Paderewski concert, a music critic waxed enthusiastic about Paderewski's pedalling. "At the hands of Paderewski," he wrote, "the pedal becomes a thing of singular beauty."
Often a misprint combined with a dubious metaphor results in a comic image. A Boston critic opined that Josef Hofmann was a pianist of but a single facet. His review came out this way in print: "Hofmann is an artist of but a single faucet, but what a faucet!"
One critic noted that a certain musician was blowing "his horn with his tongue in his cheek" - an extraordinary trick for any brass player to perform.
The pianist Rosenthal once looked over the manuscript of a piano concerto which had been submitted to him by a friend and displayed great agitation. "It is extraordinary," he kept repeating. "Just imagine! The whole first movement hasn't a single solitary theme in it. Nobody has ever achieved so much sound with so little essence!"
* * *
RIMSKY, ARRANGED BY KORSAKOV
An apprentice radio announcer in charge of broadcasting recorded music announced a Stokowski arrangement of Bach's Toccata as composed by Mr Bach Stokowski. The music supervisor of the station explained to him that when there are double names, the first is the composer and the second the arranger. The next time when Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" was broadcast, the announcer introduced it as a piece by Rimsky, arranged by Korsakov.
* * *
HALF AN OCTAVE DOWN
Studio engineers at radio stations are notoriously lacking in musical knowledge. During a rehearsal of a string ensemble, the radio engineer told the conductor that the violins sounded too high for good transmission.
"Okay," said the conductor, "I'll have them play an octave lower."
"Half an octave will be enough," replied the engineer.
* * *
MUSICAL DEFINITIONS
The following are actual quotations from school papers:
"Wagner was born in the year 1813, supposedly on his birthday."
"Mandolins are high officials in China."
"The correct way to find the key to a piece of music is to use a pitch fork."
"A sound vibration can only be heard when it makes a noise."
"There are many Russian composers who are radically different, only I can't spell their names."
"Sibelius is a nationalist. He is Polish through and through."
"Beethoven's wife and children were always quarrelling, and made him all the deafer."
"Libretto was an Italian who wrote 'Tannhauser'."
"An interval in music is the distance from one piano to the next."
"Syncopation is emphasis on a note that is not in the piece."
"Contralto is a low sort of music that only ladies sing."
"Vibrations are osculation to and fro."
"In conducting, only the down beat should be struck downward."
"Beethoven wrote three symphonies: the First, the Fifth and the Ninth."
"Bach was the master of the fudge, also the feud."
"A bassoon in one-eight Negro."
"Robinson Caruso was a great singer who lived on an island."
"An oboe is a sort of transient or tramp."
"The best cello players are those with bow legs."
"Folk music is coloured people singing what they thought about their parents."
* * *
WHAT'S IN A NAME?
The following programme would certainly puzzle the most authoritative musicologist:
Overture to "Rienzi" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cartwright
Les Preludes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flour
Invitation to the Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weaver
Scherzo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Son-of-Mendel
Largo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trade
Air on the G String . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stream
Blue Danube Waltz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ostrich
Die Moldau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sour Milk
Egmont Overture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beet Gardens
Such billing would ensue if the conductor would translate not only the titles of the pieces by the names of the composers.
Wagner would become Wagoner, or Cartwright.
Liszt means flour in Hungarian.
Weber is Weaver.
Mendelssohn is Mendel's son - hence the double S in the name.
Händel in German is the plural of the word Handel which means trade or business.
Bach is Stream (German writers speak of Bach as the fountainhead of the mighty stream of music).
Strauss means either ostrich or a bouquet of flowers.
Smetana is sour milk.
As to Beethoven, whose grandfather was born in Holland, the Beet in the name is identical with the English word Beet, and Hoven is the plural of the Dutch word for garden, similar to the German word Hof. Beethoven, consequently, is Beet Gardens. A conscientious biographer ought to investigate whether Beethoven liked beet soup, and whether he ever cultivated a beet patch.
* * *
POLYTONAL MUSIC LORE
George Bernard Shaw is critical of the piano as a musical instrument. As long ago as 1894, he wrote in the Fortnightly Review that "time will come when we shall regard the piano as an execrable, jangling, banging, mistuned nuisance."
The celebrated Cardinal Newman cared little for music. In his treatise, The Idea of a University, he opined: "Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education."
Jerome Kern declared in an interview that he got his best melodies from bird calls during his stay at the Austin Ornithological Research Station. The most melodic bird in his estimation is Melospiza Melodia.
The following advertisement appeared in the Fremont, Ohio, News-Messenger in 1947: "Help wanted: Base vile player to play with small orchestra."
Wagner did not like the saxophone. He said it "sounds like the word Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge."
Mascagni, who was sceptical about the average intelligence of a tenor, used to say that there are three degrees of comparison in the Italian language: Stupido, Stupidissimo and Tenore.
"Brahms - what a pianist! One of ten thumbs!" - Philip Hale.
"Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned." - George Bernard Shaw.
"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating and singularly harmonious." - Baudelaire.
"A true music lover is one who on hearing a blonde soprano singing in the bathtub puts his ear to the keyhole." - Anon.
"The opera house is an institution differing from other lunatic asylums only in the fact that its inmates have avoided official certification." - Ernest Newman.
"Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." - John Philip Sousa.
"Music is neither secular nor religious. It can at best suggest the beating of the pulse, the rhythm of the blood that accompanies a given order of ideas." - Henry Noel Brailsford.
"Listen to music religiously as if it were the last strain you might hear." - Henry David Thoreau.
"Music is the only divine art we are promised in heaven, and it is certainly the only divine art with which we are tortured on earth." - Mrs John Lane.
"Music is a kind of counting performed by the mind without knowing that it is counting." - GW Leibniz.
"Music helps not the toothache" - George Herbert.
"Music softens, and often rubs out, the cares of the day." - William Feather.
"If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation." - Oscar Wilde.
"What classic opera needs to succeed in the United States is a hero who can tell the heroine "I love you" in less than twenty minutes." - Alexander Smallens.
"Beware of the person who says he never goes to concerts because the people, the hall, et cetera; prevent him from enjoying the music: he is first cousin to the numerous family of those who 'have no time for reading', the truth being that music bores him - though he dares not say so." - Edward Sackville-West.
"The musician who invented ought to." - O.O. McIntyre
"Musick and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is." - Samuel Pepys.
"An old millionaire had waited a long time for his daughters to get ready for a concert. Finally, he shouted upstairs: 'What a time you girls take! Look at me - a bit of cotton in each ear, and I'm ready.'" - David Bispham.
"Music is essentially useless, as life is." - George Santayana.
"What I love best about music are the women who listen to it." - Jules de Goncourt.
"Nothing is capable of being well set to music is not nonsense." - Joseph Addison.
"Of bestial howling and entirely frantic vomiting up of hopelessly damned souls through their still carnal throats, I have heard more than, please God, I will ever endure the hearing of again in one of His summers." - Ruskin (upon hearing a secular cantata)
"Chloroform, they say, will raise the voice and increase the volume of it. The hearer should take it with the singer." - Philip Hale.
"Nothing is wrong when done to music." - Jerome Kern.
"The different between a good and bad conductor is that one has the score in his head, and the other has his head in the score." - F. H. Cowen (often misattributed to Hans von Bulow)
"When I was young, I was only the son of Moses Mendelssohn the philosopher, and now that I am old, I am only the father of Felix Mendelssohn." - Abraham Mendelssohn.
"Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay." - Attributed to Dumas
"I know only two tunes: one if Yankee Doodle, and other isn't." - U. S. Grant
"Discords make the sweet airs." - George Gershwin.
"Music critics are the Tin Ear Brigade." - Jerome Kern
"A love song is just a caress set to music." - Sigmund Romberg
"Nightingales sing badly." - Jean Cocteau
"The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches." - Jean Cocteau
"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee." - Jean Cocteau
"This birdman, this scarecrow - it's the conductor." - Jean Cocteau
"What is folklore? I am folklore." - Villa-Lobos.
"A singer is somebody who insists on giving Silent Night at the top of his voice." - Boston Globe (December 20, 1947)
