Leonard Bernstein in his young persons' concert about humor in music says that musical humor is entirely self-referential: it can only make a joke about music itself, not something exterior to music.
I will argue that there can be a music joke about the text of the song, or a joke that works from the disjunction between music and words. We''ll see.
1 comment:
Your claim is the conventional one, Bernstein is thinking too narrowly. Word painting is easy to make jokes with.
One example I often trot out is in "Dichterliebe", where the first few songs are fairly short and quiet, with limited vocal range. When Schumann pulls out all the stops and lets the singer shake the rafters with ringing high notes and booming piano accompaniment, it's for the song "Ich grolle nicht", i.e. "I'm not complaining."
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