Terrible Counterpoint in Mozart's "A Musical Joke" ("Ein Musikalischer Spaß") 

Well to be fair it still sounds good but some parts of it are just fun

*Mozart makes fun of amateur composers* *Amateur composers* - Why you bully me

Mozart composed this piece right after the death of his compulsively demanding father. It was as he was paying "tribute" to all of what his father taught him NOT to do. It was as young Mozart was feeling freedom for the first time of his life.

@@jorgeespinoza3938 Woah, cool.

I know. But it wouldn't have been such a great idea, and it wouldn't be Mozart, if it wasn't also fantastic music on some level.

He even made scatological references in some of his letters

@@gelatinocyte6270 yeah so literally "shit"posting

These aren't _just_ shitposts, even. Mozart was also referencing other musicians' pieces to poke fun at them... this is an ancient musical meme

@@gelatinocyte6270 Search "Leck mich in Arsch Mozart" on RU-vid...

You are completeley stupid and mediocre.

Cory Mck ackchyually Mozart is dead! Some people are sooo stupid smh

@@tamashellwig5275 Like soooo stupid

@@tamashellwig5275 too stupeed

@@tamashellwig5275 r/woooosh

Eduardo Squidwardo your the idiot 😂

The God like madlad

same 😢

Sweety, If your counterpoint sounds even remotely like a Mozart joke, you still are composing at genius level! Happy composing!

in fact mozart's joke counterpoint is way better than most of the counterpoints modern composers wrote, so congrats you are awesome

It's not so much that it's awful, but that this was 90% of the everyday mid / pot boiler music with all its clichés and mistakes.

7 bar themes? Well thats so quint. Tonality, ahh that the devils work.

Or that if his musikalischer Spaß had been composed today, the composer would be chastised for writing easy listening.

modern composers have nothing new so they write shit. When I said modern composers, I meant to say modern, "classical" genre orchestral concert music. I should have used another word other than "shit" Unpleasant and artificial dissonances is a better description. Art reflects the socio/economic/political times we live in.

abz124816 gee thanks. Thats inspiring

@@abz124816 you just don't know where to find good modern music

and why the horns truly learned their lesson - they were the only ones who played the right notes in the last few bars of the last movement

I actually liked that horn part.

When we did this, we (the horn players) were dismissed after the "mistake" so we went to the bar and were brought back with half-empty glasses for the finale. But why didn't Mozart just ask for the wrong crook? The wrong notes he writes would have to be hand stopped and so would not be a good simulation. Another fairly common "wrong crook" joke is to play the horn solo at the start of Weber's overture to Oberon a semitone sharp - in rehearsal of course - and wait for the strings to enter. It's amazing how many string players and conductors don't have perfect pitch!

Filippo Carnovalini I appreciate the help for my Google Slides project on this song for school.

@@cpestrauss8740 do you have that horn solo prank on video somewhere? sounds hilarious! On a serious note, you don't need perfect pitch to be a good musician in my opinion

April Fools!

JOKES on you Bartok!

@@MrAdamNTProtester Since when was Bartók contemporary...?

Contemporary classical music is a joke.

RDVMusic This would explain the E note missing in the next trill !

@@adrianomeis184 that makes sense!

@@musik350 and Adriano Meis: I wish I'd figured this out before making the video!

@@Richard.Atkinson Oh well, this is only a little detail. Your video was precise enough

Richard Atkinson Your videos are just awesome, no need to add anything

I don't think he's mocking the audience, he's mocking amateur musicians and inferior composers.

He’s mocking the stylistic cliches of the music scene he was a part of, so if you (like most people in 2019) are not deeply inundated in the 18th-century European classical music world then not only is the mockery lost, so is the knowledge that all the intentional cliches are, y’know, cliche. It’d be like watching a parody of Hollywood action movies without ever having seen one and thinking “Whoa, that looks cool!”

Raises the question =/= begs the question

I think Mozart partly wanted to play around with unconvential composing methods. If he would have released some parts of this piece under another title, he would have been called a bad composer. In the early classic era many things were just considered wrong in music.

It was not Mozart mocking you... it was GOD!!!

Ffirst comment ive seen not favorited by op, but best joke out there

Chris Ramey glad someone said it

with colored graphs and external references ! those are the funniest

@@MrTocoral /BKorP55Aqvg might amuse you. 🙂

Mozart didn't mean it to be a "joke". "Spaß" means "Fun". And Fun can be endless.

Wow! Even the legend himself Tantacrul is here!

like your own music

Wow, never expect Tantacrul to be here!

​@@Whatismusic123 facts

@@Whatismusic123 Like every single comment of yours

Which proves the "rules" don't mean anything. Things the narrator called "clunky" and "ridiculous" were actually pleasing. Which, in music, means they really aren't. A good example is a composer intentionally building tension only to fumble the resolution, which frustrates the listener. But if done well, it can actually lead to a deeper level of thematic tension to be resolved.

As you say many of these phrases are pleasing to us, but how pleasing would they have been to his audience? My sense is that these jokes would have been quite a bit more obvious and humorous to the educated among his audience than they are to us because we're much more familiar with music that violates the rules of the time.

@@JBanchiere If you play an isolated major chord, it's also pleasing. Doesn't mean it's good music. "'Rules don't mean anything' doesn't mean anything." If some people don't get the jokes and still say it sounds great, it's just maybe because they aren't that well-versed in music. It's like showing me a poor baseball or American football play. As a non-American, I just wouldn't notice it.

​@@btonasse If music is pleasing, and you're saying it's not "good" for intellectual reasons, I think we have a fundamental disagreement as to the nature of music.

You need to remember that we don't have the auditory quality of listeners of it's time: in an era or Rock and Pop, besides the audit pollution of our modern industrialized world, our ears are probably damaged beyond repair, and our taste broken beyond recognition, to appreciate what a listener of it's time would have considered hilariously bad. In basic terms, in the world of Eminen and Taylor Swift, even this song sounds like a masterpiece.

Last movement of Mozart's 41th symphony left the chat.....

Oh, hi God.

@@nbnediit4364 bach loves rock and roll :)

Well, if I happened to be J.S. Bach instead of you, I'd have said "Not anyone can master counterpoint like me.". It sounds nicer.

Come to Brazil

The nevermind modulation is simply Brahms-75years early.

Those were 2 of my Favs as well... the horns are really funny

No. It is when your(my) IQ is so low that it takes 22 minutes to get the joke. I am laughing now, but to be honest I have to look at the scripts, otherwise I just hear that something is off, and since it is Mozart, I think that must be a rusty orchestra, some things are even written like that. Even the title does not say it all since a joke is short, this is a loooooong piece for a witz, if you know what I mean.

@@segmentsAndCurves Which part? First I said that my (musical) IQ was too low to understand what the joke is about on just hearing it. Next, I explain how it looked to me clumsy as if it was not executed right, there was nothing funny. Next, I say after I watched the video I realized that all that clumsiness is intentional and the point is to look at the score actually. First part, when I say that my (musical) IQ is too low, is a joke on me. Not that it is not true, I am always saying that I have stupid ears.

@@alexpeter_pen Ah, I misread. Sorry if I seem obnoxious but I was making a joke.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Ein Musikalischer Spaß. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical listener's head. There's also Mozart's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Mozart truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Mozart's existential catchphrase "Leck mich im Arsch," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Mozart's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂 And yes, by the way, i DO have a Mozart tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎

a plethora indeed :-)

@@JuergenNoll A smorgasbord of words?

A veritable cornucopia of superlatives :) However, the analysis is from the standpoint of a well educated and knowledgeable musician.

Cringey Libtard Welp, the name...checks...out? wait

@Cringey Libtard genius

fish and banana ....even the ending???

I may feel it’s a terrible orchestra but good music lol

Get your ears checked :)

Make sure you don't click the wrong track on the Spotify album

Lol get off your high horse, I’m sure without this video you would have no clue that the orchestration was intentionally bad.

His CLOCK symphony had a similar gag

@@MrAdamNTProtester Haydn had a great sense of humor. Many of his symphonies feature gags like this.

Like something by PDQ Bach, aka Peter Schickele.

Haha.

2cool4school

@Sean Brown, indeed. After playing Sostakovich's Prelude 19 Op. 34 (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-m3zLY0PioZs.html ) myself, the only weird thing I would have noticed here without the narration would've been the obviously dissonant ending. And then there are all the pieces that break the rules without even trying to be funny.

Well, many of the rules of the classical era were stylistic, and it was only correct to destroy their illegitimate mandatority

And some just sound really cool and modern. (Like the whole tone scale in the violin!) - At least for me as a jazz player! 😎🤘

@@frankybebop2913 pretty sure the whole tone scale wasn't played correctly but maybe that's the point

Yeah, me too. I can understand it on a theoretical level, but I can't say I really feel all of it. Until the "wrong" notes, of course.

I feel kinda horrible because I thought I was a musician, but the only thing I thought really sounded bad was the horn crook joke but even then I thought it sorta worked in a strange way ; w ; am I an idiot? help

I'm a musician but idk to me it's quite nice I quite like the piece the thing that cracks me up is the horn part

I think for the most part it's only really audible if you actually have had training and enough experience in counterpoint. The "rules" are intended to ensure maximum independence of the voices and a treatment of dissonance which is pleasant to the ear. This does not mean however that we naturally hear these "mistakes" because the system is logical but still man-made, jazz for example is full of parallels and dissonance treatment which Bach would probably cringe at but sounds absolutely fine to any jazz musician. You need to know what's supposed to happen before you can hear it going "wrong". If you watch the world cup final (soccer) and see an attacker lingering around beyond the opponent's defensive line, it would only be obviously strange to you if you know the rules of the game and have watched many matches before.

Counterpoint is a specific art within music, it's perfectly possible to be a good musician who is unfamiliar with it :)

@@MrShoopdawoop97 I know that x3 that's what I meant, lol But I like to study jazz, too So I'll chalk it up to that so I can sleep easy, haha

Um I think it sounded quite good....

BookOwl same tho

Me: "It's very good! Of course, just now and then, occasionally it seems to have . . . how shall One say? . . .TOO MANY NOTES!" : )

While Bach tends to write to the rule book of music (I think he invented it), parts of this are listenable , if not easily playable.

@Andrei Georgescu It sounds good. It's unpredictable and different to most people like me. Stop being pretentious, the future is now old man

I know - and even when Mozart wants to sound bad, and tries hard to do so, he can't help but actually sound quite good sometimes!

troll of the century

No, you just have to live in a time where music is supposed to follow absurdly strict rules.

@@uzefulvideos3440 Yeah I guess since they did have strict rules for writing music, any deviation was noticeable. I guess it would be like putting a rapp beat on a country song.

🍷🧐

Lmao

Uh ... Mozart wasn't British ...? He was Austrian ...? And Mozart died 110 years before the monocle was really even introduced in England ...? God help us.

😂🧐

@@user-pb1xd8pv2l please never comment on a joke again

julianto triwijaya idk why, but this meme like comment made me lol way more than the horn part!

"I dunno, use whatever you want"

Spot on: there's a certainly cross purpose to having professional musicians play this so well... actually reminds me of the Cage paradox - having done everything to remove "intentionality" from the compositional process, his performers re-aestheticize the work by virtue of their long experience of making their instruments sound beautiful & distinctive

Yes, I was thinking in this recording that a lot of it sounds fine apart from the really obvious ones.

@@kapitankapital6580 Maybe this speaks to the truth of Beecham's assertion that the British don't really understand music, they just like the sound it makes.

​@@FastusMusic :: Yes, cross purpose, but still, it does not spoil my day that the recording is so well done, enthusiastic and energetic and - what counts most for me - so well played in tune. Most of the jokes came through to me the first time. What ***really*** bothers me is that some of the truely bad passages can be played in a way so that you do not hear the clashes, stupid doublings and other gags; this means that also in "good" Mozart (and others) you will have bad passages which can be "retouched" by the players. (We knew that, but still ...)

@@FastusMusic I am wondering about that. Yes, it is somewhat cross-purpose. On the other hand, this piece manages to be both terrible and beautiful at the same time, which is high art too. Just like in the midsummer nights dream, the play at the end is dreadfully funny, but the end of the play should be really touching.

The twoset is strong in this one!

A beginner on trumpet or horn can sound pretty awful

I disagree, why is it ridiculous? Like it doesn't sounds bad or anything...

Of course! I hope it's obvious from this video that I love the piece...

That is an incredible analogy.

@@Garrett_Rowland Thanks. I'd forgotten about this, so thanks also for reminding me of it.

flawless? i like some parts, but those horn runs...

or that one violin cadenza,,,

yeah you're right. i was exaggerating a little. i know it wasn't actually flawless. just a funny thought.

yeah i know what you meant but those parts made me start crying of laughter

@@dbamp the double octave horn trill is what got me

I don't get it

because it's STILL better than what the average composer does lol

RandomAwesomeism Average? It’s better than masters...

me too, but I never knew that the last measures were in 5 different tonalities... I would have a major problem to enter those notes as written in my MuseScore program...

@@borisc6714 Just draw them in Paint and paste them in - it would fit the piece :P (If you draw it badly)

Just heard the chords for the first time today. Thought I might not laugh, since I considered myself forewarned by your comment--but I did! 😂

I''m in construction I get to hear that conclusion almost every other day.... grinders slip!

It's Schoenberg

I'm actually wondering if he was kind of using this as an excuse to try out new things.

Holy hell, the terrible pseudo-intellectualism reeking out of your comment. Form isn't artifical, he wasn't making fun of some artificial conventions, he is making fun of bad composers, who could not compose with coherent form, that's it, it isn't some experiment, it doesn't have any secret message, it's just a bad composition, made for the sake of entertainment. People like you are the reason modern art is criticised, and ignored by everyone except the very members of your cult.

Carl Powell when you’re so awesome, the world loves.... even your bad music, 250 years after the fact!!

lmfaoooooo underrated

this comment needs more likes

To make this piece truly come out, I think they would have to play it with original horns. Modern horns can play this too good, which make it lose a lot of the intended effect.

> the trill on the note low G by the second horn would have been impossible Yes, I was thinking the same. There's no way to do that as a lip trill, and thus no way to play it as written on the natural horn. I have to wonder what Mozart was expecting for that passage.

Yeah, the crook story is no longer my favorite explanation for this passage (I never thought it made a lot of sense).

Yes this was recorded with modern horns unfortunately.. You can hear it at 19:47 when the second horn makes a normal trill which is impossible in a natural horn. Also the A flat and F sharp in the first passage would have just been played open because of the natural "out of tune" of A and F (11th and 13th harmonic)

@@Tehom1 If that trill is impossible to play on the natural horn, this may have simply been Mozart`s joke on his 2nd horn player maybe with the expectation he would just leave out the passage altogether--sort of like what I used to hear every so often, "Take it up two octaves and leave it out.",

I think that's sort of the point. It's good enough and something that's musically plausible, but at the same time pokes fun at the "kitchen sink" style of amateurish composers.

Ehhhhh while the notes were fine with me, I found listening to the whole thing exhausting - there isn't a "melody" that lasts more than like two measures, modulations going nowhere and ending abruptly, repetitions that are both unnecessary and too length, a stillborn fugue section. And the poor horn!

@@dandy-lions5788 The low horn trill (2 octaves below the first horn) is essentially impossible on a natural horn. The joke was on the horn player, not the listener.

ah, there is a big point there! we are so used to "broken rules" that we find the piece rather normal. we are musical barbarians compared to mozart's audience!

@@christianlingurar7085 Not at all. Our music is far more advanced than Mozart's. There's nothing wrong with enjoying Mozart and not enjoying contemporary Avant Garde works, but you can hardly call Messiaen for example a barbarian compared to Mozart.

I think the horns are the most accessible part of the piece ... everyone can laugh at that regardless of what they know of music theory

@MrAdamNTProtester The modulation in the Rondo amazed me more than made me laugh, as I felt that it sounded ahead of it’s time. That’s almost a Jazz modulation!

The first movement isn't really that obvious about its funniness - it just sounds awkward (the theme is really unimaginative and has this repetitive rhythm that gets kind of annoying when it's repeated throughout the movement), and it kind of makes you think "WTF was this composer thinking". To me, the most awkward part is the repeat after the ending. I know people don't always play repeats, but the repeat in the end really fits this piece, because it makes it sound even more awkward. "Oh, the piece ended here... Nope, it continues - MAKE IT STOP!"

Don't be discouraged :) Maybe Mozart did, too! When he was like, 3?

I know the feeling... SMH.

I was thinking the same! We would have been laughed at if we composed back then

I still make them all the time. But your ear usually lets you know that it doesn't sound good.

@@haleypatillo Lol!

It's Mozart...even in his casual, backhanded work there is undeniable beauty. He should have done a version where he takes this and turns it into his real work. That would have been a treat.

Well, maybe it had some beauty to Mozart's ears too... A musical joke or fun doesn't necessarily needs to be bad, don't you think ? Humor has a lot to do with logic and its slight bending. Maybe the whole joke is about the fact that some beautiful or enjoyable music came from some broken composition rules ? I don't know.

@@AtomicDuckQuark exactly that is the reason why i even wrote the comment. I love this video, but it has at some parts that "teacher" feeling when passages sound, or rather should sound to my ear, "ridiculous" or "stupid", and I didn't even hear any of that. I think it's interesting to see the strict rules of that time though, and like to learn about it. But the general flavor of the video was that it is a pure joke and not a piece with some really nice ideas.

@@PianoScoreVids Actually, I partly agree with you - that's why I included all the Haydn examples that are meant to be funny but not necessarily "bad."

@@Richard.Atkinson cool, thanks for your answer, i enjoy your professional work. I also have a channel, but I play obscure piano music, not analyse it as you do. RU-vid is just great because everybody can express their interests and make videos about music. So again, thank you. This piece was my task for high school graduation by the way. It was an actual funny exam to write an analysis :)

Understanding it really doesnt make it much funnier. You have to be a very specific type of music nerd to get more than two or three chuckles out of this, as you really have to know a lot about what music in mozarts time was like. Nowadays there is so much shitty music that this sounds more like some attempt to add jazzy elements to classical composing methods, back when it was written it would have sounded much more weird to our ears and it wouldnt necessarily have to be understood to be funny.

@Steven Moore Thanks! I feel better. I think...

@@Zirc0nium69 I thought that too: my ears were not too bothered by some of the highlighted jokes and I wondered how much of that is influenced by the music that surrounds us today. Knowing context makes a difference in how I understand what was happening. Btw, @Richard Atkinson, I really appreciate your analysis - very educational and eye-opening for me. :)

Unfortunately you are correct... in 1776 we had the Declaration, in 1788-9 we had the Federalist papers... today we have a rhyming dictionary & a drum machine & dueling scatologualists [ NEW WORD- Hooray!] ... oh how the mighty have fallen

Ah the great Paul Morphy, been to the opera lately?

Noah It’s always refreshing seeing the overlap between the communities. Makes me proud to be a part of both of them, you know?

Nicolas Andrews I regret to say there is a noted lack of opera houses 6 feet underground, good WiFi here though

@Steven Moore thats about right

I've tried to listen to Stravinsky's firebird but couldn't enjoy it.

Krzysztof Q I had the same initial reaction to the firebird. I think I was able to enjoy the Rite of Spring simply due to its cultural prevalence; I had been exposed to it many times through Fantasia and Cosmos as a kid. Stravinsky’s music takes some time to settle in, but once you get it, it is amazing.

@@Not_what_it_used_to_be I've been meaning to make videos about both Firebird and The Rite, so stay tuned for them! I hope Krzysztof will also watch them - maybe I'll change his mind!

Best Stravinsky is Pulcinella, based off of properly good music.

the part where there is a sequence of three sol (which do is the outcome of the sound) is a little part of the melody in the wet-nurses' dance in Petrushka

Gee thanks for the clarification... I am no longer feeling ashamed.... however I do detect some measure of rage arising?!!?

MrAdamNTProtester saAaaame

He was an Aquarius so he probably did

Maybe you meant quartet?

you wont

Now he's de-composing...

Yes, there were times, in fact, in the piece, where it progressed into a later Classical period and sounded good by those standards.

@@brandonwainscott7491 And the "wrong" horn is just typical Debussy

yeah. I'm not a big Mozart fan tbh... It's like musical starch.

@@heresasoundcomment Please watch my many other Mozart videos and see if I can change your mind! Mozart is the opposite of simple carbs.

@@heresasoundcomment agreed..way better than all that usual predictable Mozart stuff...

@@Richard.Atkinson mozart is fairly basic in his harmonic/ chordal approach...

@@englandshope689 Do you think harmony is the only element in music? Even if it is, Haydn and Mozart are two of the most harmonically interesting composers of any era. I'm not sure which pieces you have heard.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ErjZh1cQTg8.html

Hmm, I'd have expected you to be more impressed by the whole-tone scale in the 3rd movement...

Richard Atkinson, 😂😂

@@Richard.Atkinson I think of the joke as stacking modal changes in the line like doing secondary dominant upon secondary dominant in that you expect it to end but it keeps going sharp

​@@Richard.Atkinson yes really impressive and so anticipatingly modern!

Also before cool was cool! ... Though there was "sprezzatura", which was cool.

it's cause some of these things doesn't sound so strange to us like it would sound for the ears of the time. We are used to modern music and dissonant chords. Beyond that, this recording is too clean and correctly played, and they are playing modern instruments. So, many of jokes are kind of lost.

Plus parallel fifths aren't considered to be bad like they were in Mozart's day

Mozart wouldn’t call it “jazzy and Stravinsky-esque” because in his day there was no such thing as jazz, and Stravinsky wasn’t born yet, let alone writing music. I think that’s the point: Music is a much different thing now (or should I say, so many different things) than it was in the Classical era.

it doesn't sound bad because you are used to pretending that amateur compositions that don't follow any rationale outside of having a decent melody while all voice leading is random and the form being nonexistent are actually good.

​@@Whatismusic123punctuation? Syntaxis? Logic? Never learnt those at school?

The etymology may be similar for SPASTIC

In Italian spasso, meaning fun!

There is nothing classic about those mistakes... no one that incompetent could write a score