Humour and Music

- How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb?

one to climb the ladder, and four to shriek,"It's too high for her."(audience laughs) As with most musical jokes, there's an in-joke here. In this case, it's the stereotypical image that soprano singers are judged only by the quality of their high notes. Think the Queen of the Night rage aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute.(plays part of Der Hölle Rache by Mozart) It's that super-top F. Or Gregorio Allegri's early 17th century setting of the Miserere, as arranged in the 20th century.(playing part of Miserere by Allegri) That Ash Wednesday sound of that high C there. I'm married to a soprano, so you can imagine how I feel about such sweeping generalizations, they're spot-on. It is all about the high notes for sopranos. Tenors, on the other hand, are painted as self-centered. How many tenors does it take to change a light bulb? Just one to hold the bulb, while the rest of the world turns around him.(audience laughs) In pop bands, it's the drummer who suffers, hence the apocryphal story of John Lennon being asked if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world. Lennon's fictitious response was that he isn't even the best drummer in The Beatles.(audience laughs) The more sophisticated the musical joke, the more technical its postulate is likely to be. Viola players, for instance, are frequently the butt of jokes within the classical community. Most viola players begin as violinists, and the move from violin to viola is formulaically presented as a demotion to an instrument that plays easier music within the orchestra. The generalization here is that viola parts contain fewer notes than violin parts, that they are less audible within an orchestral texture, and the notes that they do play don't have to be executed with the same speed and finesse. So viola jokes can take the form of the straightforwardly dismissive. In what way is a viola like a lawsuit? Everyone's happy when the case is closed.(audience laughs) Some would mockingly ask why you'd bother to protect a viola within a case. In a similar vein, there's a viola variation on how can you tell when a politician is lying? Their lips move. That's easily modified to how can you tell when a viola player is playing out of tune? Their bow moves.(audience laughs) On a more subtle, though, no less cruel note, how do you get a viola player to play tremolando? Write a semi brief and mark it solo. Now, this may need some explanation. The stereotype here is the fact that viola players are incompetent, and consequently, nervous about sticking their heads above the musical parapet. Tremolando is the technique of so-called scrubbing the string with the bow, literally quivering. It's a much used string instrument effect, which was popularized by the Manheim Orchestra in the early 18th century, and has been used widely ever since. A semi brief, on the left, is a note of long duration. Ask for that note to be played as a solo, and the hapless viola player is so nervous that they can't control their bow. The result is bow shake, or tremolando. Indeed, the implication is that the only way you can get a viola player to move their bow quickly across the string is to scare them into a reflex action. Moving even further into the in-joke world, what's the longest viola joke? Answer, Harold en Italie. This is my favorite viola joke. It could be told almost as well, and in a less superior manner this way, what is the longest viola joke? William Walton's viola concerto. That makes the joke more obvious. The concerto is a long piece of music requiring technical excellence of the soloist, so a viola concerto is a long viola joke if you find the idea of a viola player being given a solo platform laughable. The punchline Harold en Italie is niche and funny because you have to know that Harold en Italie is, in all but name, a viola concerto composed by the early 19th century French composer Hector Berlioz. As someone who switched from violin to viola many years ago for all the wrong reasons, I find viola jokes funny. I know my limitations. Broadly speaking, our response to the above humor could be classified as laughter of recognition, or laughter of superiority, or laughter of the absurd. In some cases, there's a combination of two of these, perhaps even of all three. Here's a musical trope that you'll recognize.♪ Shave and a haircut, bay rum ♪Now, bay rum is a cologne developed in the early 19th century, and incidentally, bay rum was sometimes drunk during prohibition in desperation. This is known as the Shave and a Haircut Fanfare. It was first published in Philadelphia in 1899, and the song in which it appears is called At a Downtown Cakewalk. Then the tune acquired new words. By 1914, the comic value of the trope was clearly well understood when used in the song called Bum Diddley Um Bum. Here are two further variations.♪ Shave and a haircut, two bits ♪That's the United States version. In the UK, the version was♪ Shave and the haircut, five bob ♪Now, in the US, two bits is a quarter, which is 25 cents. In the UK, five bob was five shillings, which is 25 pence. Don't use that to calculate the exchange rates for the early 20th century.(audience laughs) That would give $1 to the pound, whereas it was actually $5 to the pound. In 1939, a song was published in New York called♪ Shave and a haircut, shampoo. ♪Then it was used as a cartoon sendoff,♪ Shave and a haircut, that's it ♪And Leonard Bernstein used it in his 1957 Broadway show, West Side Story at the end of the song, Gee, Officer Krupke. Originally, the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim ended with the rather obvious, Gee, Officer Krupke, F-word you, but Columbia records censored that, and Sondheim came up with the alternative, Gee, Officer Krupke, krup you. Sondheim later acknowledged that though he'd been upset at having to take the F word out, its substitute had ended up being regarded as one of the great lines of the show, a clear case of obscenity being the mother of invention.(audience laughs) How about this?(plays the tune of Shave and a Haircut Fanfare discordantly) Is that funny?(audience laughs) Well, Mozart thought so.(audience laughs)(music from Mozart's A Musical Joke playing) The very end of Mozart's A Musical Joke. At the beginning of the 20th century, the American composer, Charles Ives did a similar thing in the rewrite of the end of his Second Symphony.(music from Ives's Second Symphony playing) The result is indeed absurdly funny, as is the point in the last movement of Haydn's 60th Symphony, where the music stops, the violins tune up, and the music continues unabashed. Here's the score. You can see that this sixth movement begins, normally, right in the middle of the page there, you can see two bars rest, and then the violins play first there as if they were tuning, play their two upper strings, then the two middle strings, and there in green, you see highlighted, they play their lowest strings, and the effect to tune the lowest string until it's in tune. Then as you can see at the bottom line, couple more bars rest and on they continue as if nothing had happened.(music from Haydn's 60th Symphony playing) Haydn's Surprise Symphony Number 94 is even better known. It was composed for the first of Haydn's two visits to London in the early 1790s. Its second movement starts quietly, and after just enough time to lull its unsuspecting London audience into a full sense of security, a loud chord comes out of nowhere. There, you can see the strings begin this movement. They proceed to the bottom line, and then out of nowhere, a very loud chord from the full orchestra. Now, we perceive this as a joke, but Haydn really intended it as something not so much funny as novel. Haydn's student, Ignaz Pleyel, had given concerts in London a week earlier, and by his own admission, Haydn wanted not to be outdone by Pleyel, so he thought he'd try something new.(music from Haydn's Surprise Symphony playing) The London public loved it. Two decades earlier, Haydn had even turned an employment grudge into a successful joke. In the autumn of 1772, Haydn's musicians at the summer Palace of Esterháza had been working without a break for longer than expected, and many of them were missing their families who were back in Eisenstadt. Now, in the late 18th century, the journey from Esterháza to Eisenstadt took a whole day, so you couldn't just nip home. Prince Esterházy was a relatively good employer, and he in Haydn had a close and productive working relationship, but the musicians were restless, so Haydn wrote a symphony. whose ending stated the contractual grievance of his orchestra. Here are the last three pages of the symphony. In the last movement of the symphony, one by one, the players stopped playing, snuffed out their candles, and left the stage, first oboe, then second horn, followed by bassoon. Then as you can see on the score, the remaining players were gradually instructed to leave (indistinct), the score says each time on the left hand page there, second oboe and first horn, blow out the candles, disappear. Then the middle of the second page there, the double bass goes, then at the bottom of the second page, the cellos go, top of the right hand page, the third and fourth violins leave, and lastly, in the middle of the last page, the violas go. That leaves just two violinists to finish the symphony, one of whom would've been Haydn himself. Prince Esterházy apparently understood the reference, and he let the orchestra go on leave. If only all employment disputes could be settled by using humor as a bargaining tool. And now I'll get to the crux of humor and music, Mozart's A Musical Joke of 1787. Is it funny, and if so, in what way? Mozart was 31, old enough to know better, you might say, but there were extenuating circumstances. Mozart's father had died just two and a half weeks earlier, so was this musical joke in some way, a tribute to his father, or was it a backlash composition? The controlling father had died, so now Wolfgang could be his own man. A Musical Joke is a divertimento, a diversion, an amusement, but more than that, it's actually a series of deliberate jokes. I've already mentioned that the last three chords of the last movement, which are absurdly funny, crash, crash, crash are musical slapstick, but the whole piece is not so much slapstick like its ending, but rather a satire of composers less able than Mozart, and let's face it, most late 18th century composers were less able than Mozart.(music from A Musical Joke by Mozart playing) It's actually very funny.(audience laughs) It begins with three chords that are all the same,(playing chords) fair enough. In spite of its mundanity, it's fairly obvious. The first phrase constitutes a reasonable four bar antecedent.(playing the part of A Musical Joke) So the consequent which follows should go something like this.(playing a made up part for A Musical Joke) That's just me playing around, but here's Mozart writing properly beautiful antecedent, and consequent phrases, here from his Piano Sonata in F of three years earlier. So the consequent,(playing part of Piano Sonata in F by Mozart) the antecedent and now the consequent,(playing part of Piano Sonata in F) if A, then B, beautifully balanced. But at the opening of A Musical Joke, Mozart seemingly writes a four bar phrase which he repeats to give an eight bar phrase, so the antecedent.(playing part of Piano Sonata in F) That's the antecedent, and then the consequent is exactly the same.(playing part of Piano Sonata in F) If A then A, except that Mozart doesn't even do that. He does what he thinks an incompetent composer might do in trying to be clever. Mozart takes out the repetition of the three chords in the middle, and makes a pun, a bad pun, where the three chords are only heard once, thereby standing for the end of the antecedent, and simultaneously the beginning of the consequent, an instance of bisociation, a technique that really doesn't work in this context, which Mozart knows oh, so well, so the result is a gauche, unbalanced seven bar phrase.(playing part of Piano Sonata in F) If A, A. After an inept exposition, the beginning of the development is hardly developmental. Here's the development of Mozart's 40th Symphony from the following year.(music from Mozart's 40th Symphony playing) Fluid, inventive, imaginative, shifting, provocative, developmental on a number of levels. But at the beginning of the development section of A Musical Joke, the music is anything but developmental. The chords hammer away, and then there's an abrupt and unsatisfying key change.(playing part of A Musical Joke) There's no feeling for drama, and the key change is confusingly elliptical, rather than momentous. Perhaps the best gag of all in this first movement is that there's a repeat mark at its end as per the 18th century convention of this type of movement. Do we want to hear this section again? No, of course not, but we're going to anyway.(audience laughs) Mozart was a stickler for adhering to the rules of harmony and counterpoint. The young English composer Thomas Atwood spent two years from 1785 to 1787 studying composition with Mozart, and Atwood's exercises are peppered with Mozart's corrections, and sometimes uncolloquial admonitions, you are an ass, be more attention, et cetera. As Mozart's teaching of Atwood drew to a close, Mozart wrote A Musical Joke. The minuet is a vehicle for all manner of clumsy part writing of the sort that Mozart had witnessed in his pupil's submissions. Most cruelly of all, Mozart writes a fugue-like section in the last movement, where the fugue is perfunctory and incompetent, and is based on a fugue that Atwood himself submitted to Mozart on the 13th of August, 1786. It's one thing to criticize and correct your pupil's work. It's quite another to serve it up for all and sundry to laugh at. And here is a picture of those sketchbooks. This is Mozart's submission. These is the Mozart, the exercise books that Atwood wrote in his exercises for Mozart, and here is this student fugue.(playing student's fugue) I don't think it's too bad, actually. It's clearly a student work, but I don't think it's actually too bad. But here's how it ends up in Mozart's A Musical Joke.(part of A Musical Joke playing) One of the most successful moments in A Musical Joke occurs when the two horn parts are heard playing wrong notes compared to the strings. It's funny in and of itself in an absurd way, but these horn parts offer the most involved in-joke in the whole piece. It's to do with the way that the horn was played in Mozart's day, without the help of modern valves. To play certain notes, you need to alter the length of the resonating tube, hence these different sized crooks, and also, by placing a hand within the bell of the instrument, the pitch of a note could be changed. Mozart's joke is that one horn player interprets a passage one way, while the other interprets it another. The result is a harmonic mess, at which point, the two hornists realize that something has gone awry, and both correct their hand position to what the other was doing. The result is another harmonic mess. Two wrongs don't make a right. So what we are to assume that the horn players were looking at and what they were meant to play.(playing a corrected part of the piece) But what actually, when they get their hand positions mixed up comes out.(playing part of A Musical Joke) That's actually quite a good joke, because it works on two levels, the uninitiated hear a very obvious harmonic mess, whereas officionados of the natural horn are in technical in-joke heaven.(audience laughs) However, hornists will laugh less at the point where the horns are given ludicrous lip trills. Mozart's own father in his treatise had noted the absurdity of horn trills in A Treatise on the Fundamental Principals of Violin Playing, which he published in 1756, the year in which Wolfgang was born, as it happens. And Leopold Mozart, Mozart's father says don't use horn trills. They sound stupid.(part of A Musical Joke playing) Note, this is not a dig at horn players, but at composers who ask horn players to do inappropriate things. The third movement sets the leader of the orchestra up for failure. Mozart is lampooning the small town musical wannabe. At the cadenza, the point where the leader of the orchestra gets to display his violinistic skills, the hapless violinist meanders around his fingerboard without any real point. The violinist himself appears impressed with his improvisatory skills, although he's on his own in this regard. Scales, arpeggios, trills, leaps, and contrasting dynamics are all part of this wannabe musician's armory, but their use is stilted, and the individual elements, although admissible in themselves, don't form a coherent musical narrative. And in this cadenza, the poor fellow really bites off more than he can chew, and ends up getting musically lost as he he climbs into the musical stratosphere, whereupon he tries to salvage the situation by plucking his lowest string for effect."I'm in trouble, but I've only used my bow so far. I'll use pizzicato, that will impress them," you can see that at the bottom right there, just a single pizzicato note on his lowest string,"and with a bit of luck, they'll forget about that inappropriate whole tone scale," which I've underlined in yellow just before it, after which our solo violinist alights on the wrong trill, but is mercifully rescued by the orchestra who bring the movement to a close in order to put everyone out of the violinist's misery.(part of A Musical Joke playing) And now the technical bit. If you can't follow it, then please just ignore this bit, but it is important to show what Mozart is doing. Mozart deliberately throughout the piece involves moments of bad counterpoint. As I say, he'd just been teaching his English student Atwood for two years several times a week, so he was really in the groove where it came to correcting work. So it must have been quite fun for him to actually write the sort of thing that he'd been correcting for two years. And so here are just some things. I mean, you can tell that I teach harmony counterpoint, can't you? This, I love this. Anyway, top left here, here's a clear instance of parallel octaves. This gets the red pen. So I've extracted the first violin part, and the viola and cello parts, and what we have here is(plays the part of the music) which is a big no-no.(plays part of the music) You have these parallel octaves(plays musical octaves) between the top and bottom parts. The whole point's about counterpoint is it's meant to respect the independence of part movements, and if you have things where strong consonances like octaves are heard in parallel between parts, it ruins the independence of the line, and this is the basis of counterpoint, and here it is writ large,(playing part of music) and you can hear that.(repeats part of music) If you look at the right hand example, this is peppered with lots of different thoughts. So looking there, first of all, there's some parallel sevenths between the first violin and the viola.(plays part of music) Here's the parallel sevenths,(plays part of music) that sound there, those parallel sevenths is ugly.(plays part of music) And then to the right of that parallel sevenths, at the same point between the second violin and the cello.(plays part of music) There they are.(repeats part of music) Those ugly parallel sevenths, and it goes on. If you look where I've extracted it at the top of that page, there's a so-called exposed octave, but here between the first fiddle and the cello.(plays part of music) An exposed octave is where the top part leaps to some kind of strong consonant, in this case an octave in the same direction that the bottom part moves.(plays part of music) And that bumps again, bad counterpoint. And then also at this section parallel ninths between the first violin in and the cello.(plays part of music)(repeats same) And they are parallel ninths. The opening of the final movement of Mozart's A Musical Joke was for many years used by BBC television as the signature tune to the Horse of the Year Show. Mozart was lampooning composers who couldn't write balanced phrases or control their changes of key.(part of A Musical Joke playing) A joke to late 18th century audiences, this quirky and unpredictable music was an appropriate musical introduction to the Horse of the Year Show, which often featured quirky and unpredictable movements of its equine stars. Technically speaking, the music itself is clumsy, mechanical, and repetitious. That's the joke, or rather the satire. There's also a viola joke in the last movement, where the violists begin late, and are heard trying to catch up. Mozart himself was a viola player, so this part of the piece could be seen as something of a self parody, but it's too little, too late. Mozart's A Musical Joke is a at best snide, and at worst cruel. Exaggeration, incongruity, and parody merged together to create a vicious combination of laughter of superiority, recognition, and of the absurd, and all the laughter is at the expense of the second rate musician. There's no scherzo movement in Mozart's A Musical Joke. It's unnecessary because each of the four movements is in itself a scherzo, a joke. The scherzo emerged in the vocal music of the Italian innovator Claudio Monteverdi in two collections of Scherzi Musicali, musical jokes, which were published in 1607 and 1632 respectively. These scherzos, scherzi are more in the nature of lighthearted music rather than actual jokes. In the same manner, the scherzo began to be used in the classical era as a substitute for minuets within string quartets and symphonies. All six of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets of 1781 include a scherzo. Indeed, the set of six is sometimes known as li scherzi. One of the Opus 33 Quartets, number two is actually known as The Joke. Here's why, the way that it ends is the joke. So here's the whole of the quirky last page.(part of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets playing) Is that a universally understood joke? Not, I'd suggest, in all cultures. There are a few universals in terms of musical humor. Context is everything. Musical jokes are culture-specific. A humorous style might be for instance, the musical backdrop to a French farce, as in the stop start party mania of the final movement of Jacques Ibert's 1929 Divertissement, diversion, first piano slapstick, then it's party time.(part of Ibert's Divertissement playing) This is clearly lighthearted, humorous, farcical music. The police whistle adds to the comedy of the moment, and the circus ride music is all part of the jocular mayhem.(part of Ibert's Divertissement playing) Wa, wa, wa, it has to be descending. It's just not as funny going up. But these musical antiques are rooted in specifically Western culture, apart, I would suggest, from the use of the whistle. In certain musical cultures, that might be the one sound that's familiar, although probably not considered worthy of classification as a musical instrument. It's also possible for a musical gesture to be taken from one context and reused in another, for instance, scary music reused for humorous purposes. Here's a cue from the 1946 film, The Killers starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. The screenplay is by Ernest Hemingway, based on his own short story of 20 years earlier. The music is by Miklós Rózsa. The cue is labeled Danger Ahead, and you will know it.(playing Danger Ahead) The Danger Ahead cue is used in the 1950s TV, film, and radio police drama series set in Los Angeles, Dragnet.(playing Danger Ahead) The story you're about to see is true. The Danger Ahead cue is used within the National Hockey League in North America. Some venues use it when there's a penalty against the home team, danger ahead. Inevitably perhaps, Danger Ahead has degenerated into the portrayal of mock fear, pantomime danger rather than actual danger. Music is integral to cartoon, and was used from the early 1920s onwards. Cartoon music came of age in Disney's Silly Symphony series, 75 musical short films drawn between 1929 and 1939. A year later in 1940, Scott Bradley's scores for Tom and Jerry utilized a heavily signposted system of light motifs to support the colorful cat and mouse drama. A celebrated one is MGM's the Cat Concerto of 1946. It's a seven and a half minute cartoon which uses Liszt's Hungarian Rapsody Number Two. Tom is the cat in concert attire playing the piano. Jerry the mouse is living inside the piano. Scott Bradley arranged Liszt's Rapsody for the cartoon, with the twist that he arranged it for two pianists to play, himself and John Crown, one piano, four hands, so that it sounded even more difficult than Liszt's original. The humor is partly in using a serious pillar of the European cannon in a cartoon, and partly the more obvious humor that it's awkward to control a difficult mouse while you're trying to play the music of Franz Liszt.(audience laughs)(part of Liszt's Rhapsody Number Two playing) Scott Bradley's cartoon arrangement of Franz Liszt's Second Rapsody, and the Cat Concerto won an Academy Award. And while we're on the subject of cats, there are two cats on a steep roof, which cat slides off first? The one with the lowest mew. Now, if you know that the Greek letter Mu stands for the coefficient of friction, then it's funny. The point is that it's not just musical jokes whose humor is guardedly in-house. Jokes can be a way into any technical subject. My own father, for instance, found his way into becoming an opera lover via the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. My father's teenage logic was such that if it was worth the Marx Brothers sending up opera, then there must be something in it. And music was very important to the Marx Brothers. Harpo was seen playing the harp from which his name derived, and Chico, who was a largely self-taught pianist, made he his unusual style of playing an integral part of his routine. Musical humor in the Marx Brothers is dependent on exaggeration and incongruity. The physical gestures are overdone, and it's the frequently incongruous context of the musical scenes that makes them funny. And I wonder how many sales of the Grieg Piano Concerto were as a result of the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show five decades ago, where André Previn, pianist and then principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra agreed to be lampooned."I'm playing all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order," Eric Morecambe observed having made a stab at the first movement's primary theme with his right hand, and having literally made a fist of an oompah accompaniment with his left. It's a profound musical statement in some respects. The 88 keys of piano are indeed enough to play all of common practice music, but you do have to know the order and combinations in which to play them. And then there was Monte Python's simplistic attitude towards the technique of playing the flute. In how to do it, John Cleese explains you blow there, and you move your fingers up and down here. To return to the Shave and Haircut Fanfare, which I was speaking about at the start, when stripped of its tune, presented as a rhythm, and simplified, it becomes a lighthearted call and response entrance quest.(knocking and clapping call and response rhythm) This also has a serious side in that certain people from certain cultures will be able to provide the response, and those from outside those cultures may not. Shave and a Haircut seemingly became a shibboleth. It's said that US prisoners of war in Vietnam would use the Shave and a Haircut call to ascertain whether a new prisoner in an adjoining cell was indeed American. Comedy can indeed be a serious business. And as I've also observed, musical humor can be self deprecatory, for instance, the portrayal of altos as second class sopranos, or viola players as second class violinists, or kit drummers as unmusical, because they don't play tunes, and conductors as superfluous, because they don't make any sonic contribution at all, or at least they shouldn't. Mind you, pianists don't ordinarily hum along to themselves when playing Bach, but the legendary Canadian pianist, Glen Gould frequently did so on his iconic gramophone recordings. To those of us who admire and revere Gould's pianism, this humming is part and parcel of Gould's presentation. To others, it's just funny. In what I've said, I haven't focused on the difference between humor and wit, and there is a difference. Wit requires intelligence and sharpness of mind. Wit is intellectual, and wit may not always be funny. Humor is the quality of being amusing. A good joke should provoke laughter. Much music is witty without being humorous, and it strikes me that musical wit is integral, visceral, whereas musical humor tends towards the superficial, not superficial in terms of the musical technique needed to portray humor, but superficial in terms of its aim to provoke laughter. Haydn seems to me a successful musical humorist, and a sympathetic one. His musical jokes tend towards the innovative, the attention-seeking in the nicest possible way, and the culturally absurd. They never perverse. Haydn is laughing with you, and is enjoying your reaction to what he's composed. Mozart's humor, again, it seems to me, is more likely to take the form of poking fun at others, rather than trying to innovate, or to find the humor in universals. I'm now looking back over this series of Music and Emotion, or music in abstract, as it was originally devised. The previous three lectures, Music and Nostalgia, Carols and Nostalgia, and Music and Love mentioned the effect of the so-called reminiscence bump. The reminiscence bump is the tendency for people over 40 to have increased or enhanced recollection of events that occurred during adolescence and early adulthood. It was identified and named by Professor Alan Parkin of the University of Sussex in 1996. Running with this in 2018, the American journalist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed data from Spotify, and published his findings in the New York Times. Stephens-Davidowitz worked out that you have particular affinity for songs that were released when you were 11 to 14 for a girl, and 13 to 16 for a boy. Indeed, on average, your favorite song is likely to be one that you raved about when you were 13 years old if you're female, and 14 years old if you're male. Having initially been a little skeptical about this claim, I found that my favorite albums do indeed date from when I was 14, and some of my favorite pieces of classical music and eclectic mix were played at the BBC Proms in 1975 to which festival my 14 year old ears were glued by means of the radio. And so my eclectic taste in classical music hails not so much from my own open mind, but more from Proms controller Robert Ponsonby to expand my adolescent mind by devising programs for what has subsequently been described as the world's largest and most democratic music festival. My musical taste, like my sense of humor, is controlled and nurtured by my circumstances and those around me, every bit as much as from within. And so to finish, a joke about myself, or rather, a joke about conductors, of which I am one, and it typifies what many performers feel about many conductors. How many conductors does it take to change a light bulb? Nobody knows, 'cause nobody's watching.(audience laughs) Thank you, thank you.(audience clapping)- [Audience Member] I was just wondering why you suppose the line that descends is funny, but if you play the exact same thing going up, it's not. Is it because it's universally uplifting when we ascend?- I mean, I've been thinking about that. I genuine when you don't know, and I suspect you're right. It's just that things going down, everything going, stuff going down the tubes, you know, that's funny, isn't it? Somehow, you're right. If it goes up, it's not funny in the same way. You know, what goes up must come down. That's the sort of implication. Yeah, I've been thinking about that, but I've tried it. I've also sort of tried fabricating things where that kind of phrase goes. It's just not, it's a bit silly, really. I mean, I'm not suggesting that it coming down is anything but silly, but I think it's as simple as that. It's just we associate going down with things being sort of not quite right. And if things are going up, that's optimistic. Well, that's not as funny, is it?(indistinct comment from audience) Well maybe it is, but maybe the sort of wawa mute on the trombone, maybe that's not so universal. I don't know. But yeah, maybe so, maybe things going down in a musical context are funny. That certainly makes me laugh. I mean, it made a few of you laugh here as well. If it went up, it wouldn't. That's all I know.- You didn't mention Hoffnung, and the way that you listen to a piece of music you know, and suddenly it becomes something completely different, and that seems funny.- Yeah, no Hoffnung was utterly brilliant. But again, I mean, a number of people are not, do not find Hoffnung funny, and because a lot of them are in jokes, you have to know the pieces or at least the genre that he was lampooning, and you need to know it quite well. And with all the musical humor, if you know the piece, and if you know the genre really well, then yes, they're very funny, and they take quite a lot of, they take quite a lot of working out. If you don't know the piece, and you don't know what they're lampooning, it's just all a bit puzzling. I'm thinking in particular about when the Walton Belshazzar's Feast moment, you know, that they get the huge choir on, and they just sing, you know, an extract from, they just shout the word slain, and then go off. I mean, if you know your Belshazzar's Feast, that's very, very funny, but I can imagine people watch that and go,"Well, that's just a load of people shouting one word. Why is that funny?" I mean, yeah, we know it's, but sort of, and as I think I probably proved at some point, the more you have to explain a musical joke, the less funny it becomes. So really it's sort of preaching to the converter. Well, as most, as I say, like the coefficient to friction, cat joke, that's also very funny to physicists, and the rest of us go, "Yeah, yeah. Curve into friction, funny. Cat, yeah. Mu."- [Audience Member] I first heard the music from the Scott Bradley cartoon in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and I presume that was a great tribute to it.- Yes.- [Audience Member] Though it was different animals?- Yeah, absolutely, and there'd been many, exactly. And there've been many tributes subsequently. It's very Scott Bradley, extraordinarily sort of influential musician, funny enough. I mean, you know, great cartoon music, and arranged music for cartoons, but actually, the way in which that's affected the way in which other music is written is extraordinary, actually, and other film music as well, but actually other classical music. And I think that's an important point to make is that actually, Hollywood in general, the things that have happened in Hollywood have really affected classical music, and vice versa, so yeah, absolutely, a tribute, yeah.- Yes, please.- [Audience Member] Is there not another category of humor which is a sort of gentle humor? I'm looking down on people. I'm thinking, not like the musical joke, but things like the scherzo of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, where the town band are playing and there's one bit which is desperately trying to catch up, and I think there's a piece by Hindemith, which is the village orchestra playing by the well, and it's just, it's like rude mechanicals, desperately trying to play, and I wonder whether that's, is that satire, or is that humor, or is that sort of condescending in some way?- Well, it is a bit condescending, and it actually happens quite a lot, the use of the sort of the town band kind of thing. I mean, sometimes it's a tribute, and I think when Charles Ives does it, I think his Three Places in New England, I think that's actually genuinely meant, and it's really sort of, it's a real visceral love of his heritage, and all the musical things that go to make that up. But I think in some composers you're right, it is a little bit laughter of superiority and look, and in the same way that I think Mozart's entire A Musical Joke is exactly that, it's very superior, and it's very clever, but it's also very cruel. And I think a lot of the use of town, as you say, rude mechanicals, that's the sort of thing. I mean, here I'm writing wonderful music, and they're over there. So just, they're just using their ears, and they're doing. There are those of us that would love to have the aural skills of fake musicians, or of town musicians. I just don't have them. I was in awe of people that don't use the dots, and they always go, "Oh, you can read anything." I go, "Well, A, I can, but B, I'd much rather have your skills where I can remember it all here, and be able to make it up." Improvisation is not something I can do. So I think you have to be careful about when you are supposedly looking down on that kind of thing, but I think some composers have, yeah, absolutely. Obviously, I wouldn't have approve that, and nor would I find it particularly, I don't want to sound sort of prudish about it, but that source of joke doesn't really work for me. I don't mind the involved jokes of Mozart, except that when he's doing this stuff about bad counterpoint, it's his pupil that he's referencing.- [Audience Member] Depends on how good you yourself are in order to, Mozart had to justify it.- Yeah, I mean, who else, when Mozart's alive, when he is writing A Musical Joke, yeah, who else would be allowed to do that? Well, Haydn and a very young Beethoven. I mean, they're the people, I guess, that would be on that level. The rest of us, yeah, he's going to lampoon what we do. And what I'm never quite sure is quite how much the 18th century audience would've appreciated, and how much the actual players themselves would've appreciated about the joke, certainly some bits, obviously, but what about the rest of it? Well, he'd have had to sit down and say,"What I was doing here, you see, what the essence of the comedy here." When you have to do that, you've lost.- [Audience Member] Who was the audience for a musical show? Was it played in a concert?- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was offered up as divertissement, as a diversion, yeah, absolutely. People would've listened to it for the first time, and presumably would've been either getting it, or struggling to get it, I don't know. History, sadly, doesn't relate what the first performance led to, but I imagine puzzlement in some cases, and I imagine also in some cases, people probably pretending to get to the joke. Some of them are obvious. We know the end's very obvious, and the pluck, the cadenza. Those are obviously enough, but the rest of it, the business of balanced phrases, and making jokes about sort of modulations and key changes, not so much.- [Audience Member] I couldn't even tell that.(audience laughs)- You can go home, listen to it, and laugh your socks off.- Are there any more questions? Great, well look, thank you very much for a tremendous lecture. I mean, this, sadly, is Professor Summerly's last lecture as a visiting professor of the History of Music at Gresham College, and I just wanted just to say a very, very few words to thank him for what he has done over the last, it's actually more than the last three years, because Professor Summerly started with his annual Christmas Carols lecture, which started in 2014, and it was only 2019 when he became a visiting professor, and in that period, he's delivered three amazing series. The first one was called Making Music, in which he looked at the way that music was created, focusing on beginnings and endings, and exploring some famously incomplete works from Bach, Mozart, and Schubert. And that was followed the second year with his series on 100 Years of BBC Radio, and this is really fascinating, because he took us through a timeline of the history of BBC radio music, examining how it actually shaped musical taste over the period, right way from the beginning to the digital age. And then finally and triumphantly, this third series of Music and Emotion from Barked the Beatles, he's shown us how music at its best acts on our hearts and minds, humor, love and nostalgia. And I would say that throughout all three of these series, Professor Summerly's brought together his knowledge of history with his incredible knowledge of the technicalities of music. Playing us the piano here this evening has just demonstrated that. So we are so grateful to you for everything you have done. We really hope we can lure you back in the future to give us the odd lecture, but in the meantime, I'd like everyone to join with me to thank him very, very much, thank you.(audience clapping)