Can music with out phrases ever be humorous? Joseph Haydn’s music suggests it may be. Haydn is the acme of the wittiness of late-18th-century music in the best way he soothes and startles his viewers from one second to the subsequent, as within the distinction between the nursery-rhyme banality of the tune that opens the sluggish motion of his Symphony No. 94, lulling the viewers right into a false sense of safety earlier than a fortissimo thwack shocks us out of
our reverie.
However all I’ve ever actually heard that piece do to an viewers – and it’s the identical with the the stop-start ending of Haydn’s so-called ‘Joke’ Quartet – is produce a smattering of cleverer-than-thou tittering, as some individuals wish to present the remainder of us that they’re frightfully intelligent for getting an 18th-century gag. I’ve by no means truly heard Haydn scale back an viewers to gales of laughter.
But in the event you hearken to Donald Swann’s association of Haydn’s ‘Shock’ Symphony – full with further key modifications, percussion and bi-tonal bizarreness – at considered one of Gerard Hoffnung’s live shows in 1956, Haydn actually does scale back an viewers to uncontrollable chuckling. The lesson of Swann’s manner with Haydn appears to be that the extra unpredictable you make a musical gag, the extra you’ll tickle our humorous bones.
However there are limits to how humorous our brains discover musical unpredictability. If an absence of perceptual connection between a sequence of sonic occasions is a sure-fire path to experiential hilarity – simply to actually pin the butterfly of this comedic level to the board! – then the funniest music ever composed must be the post-war modernisms of John Cage or Pierre Boulez. However items like Cage’s Music of Adjustments or Boulez’s Constructions aren’t humorous, and never solely in intention, however in our listening follow. That’s as a result of – paradoxically – in the event you create a context of fixed unpredictability, you’ll be able to’t create any actual sense of shock. You possibly can’t make us giggle by upending conventions if it’s not clear to us listening what these conventions truly are.
So what’s left for composers attempting to make us LOL? Carl Nielsen used the flatulent register of the bassoon for the ultimate be aware and noise of his Sixth Symphony, a gesture that appears like a raspberry to the entire piece. And whereas this bassoon solo won’t make an viewers giggle out loud, it creates an existential comedy on the sting of continuity and discontinuity, leaving us questioning: what was all that about?
And it’s that existential comedy that music with out phrases actually can create. Each music and comedy are species of purposeful purposelessness. Music, like laughter, is a pleasure that disappears in a breath, into the ether. That’s the last word punch-line of all music: it’s so vital for all of us, however so intangible, each current and absent. Music’s important comedy is that it’s a revelation of the basically fleeting situation of our lives. And that’s not a joke!
