Spike Jones & the City Slickers employed not only pistols,
but all sorts of other effects, from cackling hens to gargling,
in their arrangements of both the classics and the classic hits.
Heinrich Biber is justly famous for Battalia.
The various movements depict aspects of battle.
In his sonata for violin entitled Animal Sonata he depicts the sound of the nightingale,
the cuckoo, the frog, the hen, the quail, the cat and ‘Musketeer March’.
In various pieces John Cage
has specified not just his specialty, the prepared piano, but also toy pianos, radios.
For the television program ‘Good Morning, Mr. Orwell’ he wrote a work
played pizzicato on 8 cactus plants.
Almost anything by Cornelius Cardew, founder
of The Scratch Orchestra would qualify for unusual instrumentation, as would
all performances by The Portsmouth Sinfonia
where the performers are required to play on an instrument on which they have little experience.
Guiseppe Chiari’s Teatrino is scored for actor-pianist, rubber dolls, alarm clocks and
handsaw.
Phillip Corner often composes pieces after their first performance,
to avoid premeditation.
He has composed “Jackson Pollock-like”, by flinging spotted transparent paper on the manuscript.
In 1968 he verbalized a work with the injunction: “One anti-personnel type CBU bomb will be
thrown into the audience”. It was published but never performed.
Carlo Farina’s Capriccio Stravagante
is the first piece to use the effects col legno and sul ponticello. Farina was a pupil of Claudio Monteverde.
Morton Gould wrote a concerto with a tap dancer as the solo performer.
Percy Grainger, in his Tribute to Foster, for choir and orchestra,
requests the choir members each to have a wine glass, tuned by partially filling it. At the appropriat moment in the performance,
each chorister runs a finger around the rim of their glass, producing a chord.
Alois Haba wrote 11 microtonal string quartets.
In his Symphony No. 60, Il Distratto (The Absent-Minded Gentleman)
Haydn asks the violins to re-tune mid-movement.
The Symphony was used as incidental music for a comedy of that title produced in Vienna.
In one of the earliest pieces of program music, The Operation for the Removal of a Stone
Marin Marais depicts the dangerous events involved in surgery of the day.
After ‘Trembling at the Sight’ (of the apparatus) comes the ‘Decision to Mount’ (the operation chair), and ‘Solemn Thoughts’.
Later there is ‘Tying Down of Arms and Legs with Silk Cloths’.
Finally ‘The Convalescence’ shows that the patient is one of the
lucky few to have survived the medical treatment in those times.
Most of us are familiar with Leopold Mozart’s
Die Musicalische Schlittenfahrt and The Toy Symphony
with their use of sleigh bells and toy instruments.
In his overture to Signor Bruschino, premiered in 1813,
Rossini
asks his violinists to hit their music stands with their bows.
It caused quite a scandal!
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer’s (1623-1680) Fechtschuel
(The Fencing School) is a satyrical ballet.
The dancers imitate the foppish conceits of the duellists of the day:
melancholy leave-taking before the duel, exaggerated leaps during the combat, the cautious prowling,
punctuated by the stamping of feet throughout.
Schmeltzer was the teacher of Biber.
Karel Sorabji created a 5-hour, 250 page piano piece Opus Clavicembalisticum,
then forbade performances from 1936 to 1976.
In 1982, the Puerto Rico born composer Jeffery Stolet, professor of music at Oregon University,
wrote a concerto for orchestra, chainsaw and cow.
In the Alpine Symphonie Richard Strauss wrote for Alpenhorn, which is about 4 metres long.
This could make for novel seating arrangements, or, maybe... tripping the conductor....
In the score of his 3rd symphony Ernst Toch introduced an
optional instrument, the Hisser, a tank of carbon dioxide that produced a hissing sound through a valve.
Vivaldi’s concerto La Notte
is a graphic musical illustration of a someone’s nightmares.
La Monte Young achieves timelessness by declaring
“This piece may played without stopping for thousands of years.” He uses directives
such as “Push the piano to the wall; push it through the wall, keep pushing”; and “Urinate”.
The typewriter has become a somewhat addition to the orchestra, used by Leroy Anderson in his eponymous piece.
The Hoffnung Music Festival of 1956 premiered A Grand, Grand, Overture written by Malcolm Arnold
using 3 solo Vacuum Cleaners, 1 Floor Polisher, 4 Rifles and Orchestra.
Dennis Brain also performed a Leopold Mozart horn concerto on rubber hosepipes.
Erik Satie’s ballet Parade features interjections from typewriters, lottery wheels, a steamship whistle, pistols and sirens.
Ottorino Respighi added a recording of a warbling nightingale at the end of the third movement of <>I Pini di Roma, premiered in 1924.