A Musical Joke

English name#

The translated title A Musical Joke might be a poor rendering of the German original: Spaß does not necessarily connote the jocular, for which the words Scherz or Witz would more likely be used. A more accurate translation would be Some Musical Fun.

Structure and compositional elements#

The piece consists of four movements that take about 20 minutes in total to perform. Compositorial comedic devices include: *secondary dominants replacing necessary subdominant chords; *dissonance in the horns; *parallel fifths *whole-tone scales in the violin’s high register; *clumsy orchestration, backing a thin melodic line with a heavy, monotonous accompaniment in the last movement; *going to the wrong keys for a sonata-form structure (the first movement, for example, never succeeds in modulating to the dominant, and simply jumps there instead after a few failed attempts); *starting the slow movement in the wrong key (G major instead of C major); *a pathetic attempt at a fugato, also in the last movement. The piece is notable for one of the earliest known uses of polytonality (although not the earliest, having been predated by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Battalia), creating the gesture of complete collapse at the end of the finale. This might be intended to produce the impression of grossly out-of-tune string playing, since the horns alone conclude in the tonic key. The lower strings behave as if the tonic has become B, while the violins and violas switch to G major, A major and E major, respectively.

In popular culture#

The beginning of the fourth movement is used as the theme to the BBC’s television coverage of the Horse of the Year Show.

External links#

• *, Dennis Brain, Neill Sanders (horn); Manoug Parikian (violin); London Philharmonic Orchestra, Guido Cantelli *