History of Music

ALL YOU EVER NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MUSIC HISTORY By Prof. Lawrence Margeld, DDS Beethoven. Brahms. Borscht. Bachman Turner Overdrive. Belarus. Bomb Squad. Blacula. Ooh - Barracuda. If you are like most Americans, you stopped reading the above words at "Be-" and are now crumpled into the fetal position, crying about how stupid you are because you don't know music history. You are smart enough to realize how important such knowledge is; if you ever want to be invited to smart cocktail parties and mingle with bright young things and eventually see the underwear of graduates from all-women's colleges with trendy haircuts and laughter like a spring brook, you have to be able to tell Satie from "Sexy Sadie." But, of course, as you vainly brush at your offal-encrusted snout and genuflect before the modern god "teevee," you realize this specialized knowledge is so far out of your reach as to seem as unlikely as the sun suddenly becoming habitable. Don't kill yourself just yet, however. While you will admittedly never attain the level of expertise required to hold a conversation with even the dumbest European, you can learn just enough about music history to adequately get your fingers beneath the brassiere of a Mount Holyoke alumnae with relatively little pain on your part. This brief monograph - dashed off while I was in the Newark airport, waiting to be flown to a deliver a lecture in Budapest on how to get rich using e-mail about penis enlargement - should put you on the road to an upwardly mobile demographic of vaginal intercourse. In the Beginning Was the Lute The first thing you have to understand is that you will never be called upon to know anything about music that predates Protestantism, so forget about it. The Era of Composers People who create music are today called "songwriters"; the greatest of their ranks include Paul Simon, Josh Groban, and the author of "Walking in Memphis." However, the men* who wrote what we know today as "classical music" are never called songwriters even though, confusingly, they often wrote songs. These men are called "composers," and if you accidentally refer to them as "songwriters" in toney company the only way to save face is to immediately stop an assassin's bullet before it kills the president. So don't make that mistake, because you won't always be near enough to the president to jump. The most important composers are Bach (pronounced Batch), Beethoven, and Mozart. They wrote songs from roughly the time it was shocking to be Protestant to the time when people started calling themselves Americans. They were all Germans, and frustratingly most of their songs are written in German. You don't listen to classical music for the words, though, which are pretty dumb. Here are some words from Beethoven's 9th Symphony to illustrate my point: "Joy all creatures drink / At nature's bosoms / All, Just and Unjust / Follow her rose-petalled path / Kisses she gave, and Wine / That's right / I'm talking 'bout kisses sweeter than wi-hine." Pretty bad, and worse when you consider that it's actually supposed to be in German. This machine makes men kiss men. Classical Music, From Then to When Classical music, at the time it was written, was then known as "music." It was written and performed by Germans in whigs and breeches (a kind of early pant technology) for the delectation of margraves, dukes, fiefdoms, and other inbred pseudo-monarchs who would be swept away by successive waves of unhappy peasants. This era is known as the "golden age" of music. It was when such important works as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and Rock Me Amadeus were written (or "composed"). The primary form of music was the symphony, which was a long piece written for many instruments. Music historians have today established beyond a doubt that these were crude attempts to keep down the unemployment rate, as there is no earthly reason to have three harpsichordists playing at once. Eventually, though (and by "eventually," I mean "during the 19th century"), this happy time came to an end, as more and more margraves were being killed by peasants, and the Industrial Revolution eliminated the need for massive orchestras. A new breed of composer arose, consisting of Russians, Italians and even Frenchmen. They wrote loud, crude, simplistic symphonies that were ideally to suited to be played while one country's army was fighting another country's army. Out went the harpsichordists and in came the kettle drum players. These new composers also invented opera, a perverse form of musical acting where people stand around and sing about sex but never take their clothes off. The greatest operas were written by Italians, including Puccini and Vivaldi. They tended to write operas about sad clowns and peasants who commit suicide. Le Musique Moderne Eventually, though, people tired of these entertainments, and turned once again to Germany for music. They were not disappointed, as a demented racist named Wagner (pronounced "Strauss") wrote The Lord of the Rings, about Vikings who have sex with their sisters' horses. This was such a success that everyone agreed no one should ever write symphonic music again, and a new generation of composers stepped up to oblige. Stravinsky and Schoenberg experimented with radical avant-garde forms, resulting in works like Rite of Spring and Stompin' At the Savoy. Later, it emerged that these works were written to cover up the fact that neither man could read music, but at the time seemed so important that Europe plunged straight into World War I, at which point they stopped making music forever. End - End of Music Since then, no important music has been written or played. Avant garde pranksters like Stockhausen and Cage and Yankovic occasionally call themselves "composers," but instead of writing proper symphonies for flute and violin, they tend to write pieces with names like Suite For Drums And My Mother Thinking About The Fattening Qualities of Butter While Hovering Above My Bedroom In a Helicopter. If anyone asks you about contemporary music, all you have to say is "Well, Philip Glass is really the ne plus ultra of the concert hall," and everyone will nod their head appreciatively, because no one has ever listened to Philip Glass, and in fact he is not a real person at all but a logo used by a windshield repair company in Akron, Ohio. * Ladies do not write or play music, you fool.