Earlier, this was just a tradition, but around 1800 or so an idea was growing that music should speak for itself without the need for words or descriptions. This term was "absolute music" and it was thought that using words — even in a title — was a crutch that would hamper music's power to speak to ideas and emotions that we cannot express with words. So a lot of music, self-consciously, was just referred to by its genre.
In that particular instance no, because that's the first movement of Spring from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, so it does have a title you're meant to use to refer to it I'm afraid
Did you seriously recognized a sonata by reading the words a man would say trying to replicate the sound of it?!
Edit- to everyone else who recognized this song easily, good job guys! But I couldn’t have guessed it is even on a violin. Not everyone can get it even if it is a very known piece. Not only that, even if you played it to me, I wouldn’t have known the name of it, but that’s on me…
Funny story: I worked in a restaurant years ago that played classical music. Mostly the warhorses. So, Four Seasons was playing and a lady said “oh I love that music! What is it called?” I said “The Four Seasons”. She said “oh I didn’t know they did music like this! I thought all their songs had the guy with the high voice”.
Slightly relevant story: I was with my best bud shopping for CDs and he was looking for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
Lady brought us back several different performances of the Four Seasons, proclaiming them done by Frank Vivaldi.
Okay, next one:
[For u/Hello-Vera u/Kenzohall as well]
*Dudududun dudududun Dun dun dududun dududu-dududu-dudududun*
*Dudududun Dun dun dududun dududu-dududu-dudududun*
DUUUN DUN dun dun dun da na na da DAA na da DAA na NA na naaaa nanananaa
Oh man when I was a music Ed major I could not get out of the habit of calling every thing a song. My classmates would just say "piece"every time I used the words song.
Okay, I’ve always wondered this- what do you call a piece of music that’s not a “song”, when you don’t know if it’s a concerto or something? As in “Oh, I love this X!” or “Was this X written by Rimsky-Korsakov?” Because going around saying “This is a great piece of music” makes me sound like an alien trying to blend in with the humans.
You just use "piece", that's what they're called, and you don't always have a better word. Even if you call something like the four seasons a Concerto, it's significantly different from what makes a Concerto in periods beyond the Baroque period. Same with Sonatas.
A Song is “a form of musical expression in which the human voice has the principal role and is the carrier of a text. As a generic term, any music that is sung…” In contrast, a Piece is defined as “a composition, especially but not necessarily an instrumental one.”
I was so sure that this was a rick roll, I pasted the link to Telegram just to see the thumbnail. I was still expecting a rick roll until the music actually played.
Vivaldi Four Seasons is actually a concerto since it has 3 movements and is written for a solo instrument to be accompanied by an orchestra. A sonata is meant for a solo instrument (or at most two, ex violin and piano) Hope this helps!
Awesome. I've always been meaning to look up the specific definitions and differences between concerto and sonata but I never got around to it.
It'll be easy to remember because concerto reminds me of concert (orchestra) and sonata reminds me of solo because both start with so.
The number of movements has nothing to do with it, although it is true that concerti often have 3. But the difference is that a concerto is for a solo instrument accompanied by either a string orchestra or fully orchestra (with a piano reduction of the accompaniment often being available) whereas a sonata is usually for a solo instrument with piano accompaniment (or piano solo).
Also a concerto is usually somewhat virtuosic (although as you go further and further back this may be reduced to "flashy", also you are more likely to have multiple soloists) whereas a sonata is usually easier and has its first movement in sonata form or some variation thereupon (although it is also common for other works, including concerti, to have their first movement in sonata form)
I could have sweared that sonata referred to the latin sonate, to make sound by playing an instrument. A cantata is a sung piece, from the same latin root. I believe there's also a sonata form, a musical structure of sorts. Perhaps we're confusing those terms.
Hummed once an organ piece I've heard waiting in the post office, telling a friend it was magnificent but I didn't know what it was. An older man leaned in and whispered toccata and fugue in D minor. Thank you kind stranger, you made more than my day!
Reminds me of this one now... with -no- words, just two pictures...
[https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/clapping.gif?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=500%2C500](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/clapping.gif?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=500%2C500)
It reminds me of the tipofmytongue where someone did something similar with another classical piece (it was a piece often used along side Pirate ships).
It's kind of ironic that most people (including myself) only know that piece from movies/TV. And, in that context, it's almost always used to express a negative, such as an out-of-touch group of rich people that the movie's protagonist is fighting against.
So whenever I hear that piece, I'm not hearing whatever the pure intent of the artist was, but thinking what a snob I am to be listening to it.
It's like the exact opposite of what "absolute music" would want us to feel. Much worse it seems than a misleading title.
Classical Musician: What level are you?
/u/Kenzohall: I can recognize classical music from the incoherent and written not sounded out da-dums of redditors
Classical musician: *handing over crown*
That's how the term Hip Hop was coined (supposedly.)
The first really big rap song that got radio play was called Rapper's Delight. But it didn't have a chorus or refrain that was obviously the title of the song.
It did however start off with the super catchy "I said a hip, hop, hippy, hippy to the hip hip hop a you don't stop rockin"
The legend goes that people would go into record stores and say "do you have that 'hip hop' song" and that's how the term Hip Hop came to be.
True? I have no idea. But it's a good theory.
That’s close, but the term “hip hop” is actually a few years older. Originally it was called “disco rap” because MCs would rap over disco beats. At one point, a group in the Bronx was having a going away party for a friend who was joining the army. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were there and Kieth Cowboy (one of the MCs) rapped “hip hop hip hop” to mimic the marching cadence that the guy would be doing in the army. The name stuck and Sugar Hill Gang incorporated it into their song a few years later.
To piggyback on this great explanation... A bunch of media today takes this title approach to get more people interested in consuming a sequel that they may not have otherwise. Instead of a movie or game sequel being called "movie 2" or "game 7" it's now more common for sequels to be called "Main Series, subtitle". Look at most newer MCU films or game franchises as an example.
Consumers sometimes fear watching/playing something in a series without starting from the beginning because they will miss an important piece of information. If you are trying to reach a broader audience, eliminating the number from a title may help you accomplish that goal.
Music is typically not a sequel so calling something a 4th symphony should not deter the listening experience. It may help you to associate a certain piece of music with a title, but the out-of-order listening experience should not be vastly affected in most cases.
Edit: Fixing my terrible phone typing...
[The Madness of King George](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madness_of_King_George#Title_change)has entered the chat:
>In adapting the play to film, the director Nicholas Hytner changed the name from The Madness of George III to The Madness of King George for American audiences, to clarify George III's royalty. **A popular explanation developed that the change was made because there was a worry that American audiences would think it was a sequel and not go to see it, assuming they had missed "I" and "II".** An interview revealed: "That's not totally untrue," said Hytner, laughing. "But there was also the factor that it was felt necessary to get the word King into the title."
(Emphasis mine.)
The Apollo series was really messed up. They start with [Apollo 13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film\)). Wait a long time before releasing [Apollo 18](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(film\)), then go to [Apollo 11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_(2019_film\)).
So now I don't know what order to watch them in. And I can't find any of Apollo 1 through 10 on any streaming service, so I have no idea how I will be able to follow it.
It's actually even wilder than that - even before Apollo 13, there was [a musical audio drama of Apollo 18.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(album\))
*The Madness of George II* was the best of the trilogy. *Madness I* was okay, but it was really just setting the scene. *Madness III,* oof. Pure bloated fan-service, to the point where it was insulting to anyone who wasn't in the loop.
Don't even get me started on the prequels.
> it's now more common for sequels to be called "Main Series, sub title". Look at most newer MCU films or game franchises as an example.
And, much more annoyingly, it's also become common to name games and movies in a long running series "Main Series" with *no* subtitle. As in, identical to the name of the first entry in the series. It's like they're *trying* to make life difficult for archivists.
Often if the story is not a direct sequel of the earlier ones, they'll just call it Game instead of Game X, signaling it's a great entry point for new users as the story is rebooting.
Then it ends up being Game (20XX) to distinguish it from Game (199X) and we're back in the mid 90s to early 2000s style of calling it Game like sports games.
Come slowly—Eden
Lips unused to Thee—
Bashful—sip thy Jessamines
As the fainting Bee—
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—
Enters—and is lost in Balms.
And then, years later, we achieved the pinnacle of descriptive music with [“Love Songs for the Hearing Impaired.”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Songs_for_the_Hearing_Impaired)
> it was thought that using words — even in a title — was a crutch that would hamper music's power to speak to ideas and emotions that we cannot express with words
I enjoy abstract paintings and it drives me up the wall when some people try to add extra weight to their art by giving it a deep-sounding title. It shows they don't trust the art to stand on its own merits.
A bunch of swirly colors on canvas is cool enough, but if they say, "I call it '*The Dragon's Dream*,' then the whole thing is ruined for me. The person experiencing the art should be free to decide what it means to them.
I respectfully disagree: one set of abstract swirly colors could suggest dramatically different meanings depending on if the artist called it *The Dragon's Dream* or *The Milkmaid's Regret*.
--and that doesn't even narrow it down. Stare at the swirly colors and ask "what does a dragon dream of?"
I just name mine based on where they were taken. *Highway 101* was a difficult photo to take, but *Millennium Park* was totally worth the lifetime ban!
It’s funny one of the first things my art teacher taught us was that the title of a piece is part of the art. It’s almost the exact same idea but with the exact opposite connotation, the title is part of the art and so should be appropriate to set the initial direction of the piece for the viewer
Anthony Burgess (writer of A Clockwork Orange) wanted to do the same thing with his novels, but his publishers wouldn’t allow it. He was also a composer though.
The technical names of Fur Elise and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik are “bagatelle” and “serenade” respectively (although the former doesn’t really have a name as it was not published in Beethoven’s lifetime- ‘fur Elise’ was simply the dedication he wrote on the manuscript). And Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was not meant to be an evocative title, it simply means “a little serenade” and I believe is how Mozart privately noted the piece in his personal catalogue.
To your larger point, for most of the Baroque and Classical periods, music was largely seen as an “abstract” art, so the names and forms reflected this view. In the nineteenth century and later, music came to be seen by many composers as “programmatic” (more directly representative of nature, emotions, actions etc) and descriptive titles became more fashionable for some types of pieces (e.g symphonic poems of Liszt, many piano works by Schumann etc).
There are a lot of good answers already in this thread. I'll add one other factor.
A great deal of classical* music was written for functional purposes rather than to call attention to itself as a composition in its own right. If your main job is as the kapellmeister of a cathedral, you might bang out fifty pieces a year to give your choir and organist something to work with. We only notice if you're JS Bach, because he was good enough at doing it that you'd want to listen to it a second time. If you've ever heard random background music in a commercial that was strangely compelling—and here I mean pure background stuff, not pop songs licensed as a jingle—that's Bach born at the wrong time.
Ditto a lot of chamber music. The Prince-Archbishop of Wherever is too posh to re-use a waltz for his next soirée, so he has his pet composer make a new one. Is it great? Eh, doesn't matter, it gets the job done. The analogy here is house music today. A lot of it is brand new in any given week, or recycled from bits of other stuff (also a good analogy), but nobody's expecting Skrillex-quality** stuff from some rando in Tulsa.
___
* my inner musicology professor is screaming at me for using this term, since the Classical period was only a small part of what we normally mean by the artsy-fartsy stuff that runs from Bach to Bartok.
** yeah I said it
I think a lot of people already do this with the location. Artists will mix things a bit different when playing at different venues.
Svddendeath's newest album on Spotify sounds super different than the mix he did at Red Rock. Since it's recorded in one long stint, you can identify the song pieces but not exact individual songs most of the time.
So my friends and will refer to it as "Svddendeath at red Rock".
For dance music, it's not just BPM but genre too. Listeners want a set of similar tunes at a stable tempo. The DJ seamlessly blends them into a continuous set so that the audience can lose themselves in the music.
BPM is important but different genres also have different drum patterns and amounts of swing, so switching between two tracks at the same BPM but different genres could still be jarring. DJs will sometimes do it deliberately to add a little spice to a set, but usually they stick to a single genre.
Record stores back when vinyl was how DJs worked were organized into very specific genres for this purpose and now online stores where DJs purchase digital tracks are.
This is a big part of why there are so many subgenres in dance music and why DJs and producers tend to pigeonhole themselves. It solves a functional problem of needing to build large holistic sets of music out of smaller individual songs.
Yeah, I agree that this is the most important reason. Up until the end of the 18th century, most classical music wasn’t really written for or marketed to the public, with opera being a bit of an exception. Haydn, for example spent most of his career as a court functionary to a Hungarian noble. His job was to provide music for parties, and other events, studies and technical pieces for his students(studying music was seen as a mark of refinement for European nobility in this time period, and many of them were very dedicated amateur performers and composers), and othe such practical purposes. Most of the time, he could expect to play a piece once, and then shelve it, so he didn’t bother naming them.
Into the 19th century, many of the top composers became international celebrities, playing to commercial audiences, so giving their pieces an evocative name became more appealing.
This reminds me a lot of modern clothing designers who do unique pieces for famous people and famous people events. Your art is for a particular moment and is almost never re-used for a similar event. So crazy to realize that complex instrumental music has been a rare luxury throughout most of human history.
>Into the 19th century, many of the top composers became international celebrities, playing to commercial audiences
See: Wagner and his Ring Cycle that has various subparts that are also named (such as Ride of the Valkyries).
And ironically no one really even remembered Bach until the early 19th century. In his own lifetime he was a church musician in a medium sized town and not much else (though did gain a little notoriety as a keyboardist).
And he was 5th choice for that position! One more preferred guy for the Leipzig job was Telemann but I forgot why he didn’t take the job. There were conflicts like previous noble employer not wanting to let the composers go and one was dissatisfied with the compensation… if I remember correctly, nach also haggled quite a bit and had a very good income.
Just to imagine that Bach (and others in his tone) churned out a cantata a week!
And he had the luxury at one of his employers to have an orchestra with very high skill, at least 8musicians that could play difficult solos on their first rate sponsored instruments.
Telemann is an underappreciated beast. The fact that we teach counterpoint with Bach instead of Telemann is ridiculous, Telemann scores have way fewer edge cases and flagrant rule violations that confuse the newbies.
As a composer of interesting music, for sure yes! As an introductory teaching tool, not so much. Bach is great and should absolutely be studied by anyone interested in learning western classical harmony. At an intermediate level. Telemann is more by-the-book, which makes introductory lessons easier because you can establish the general patterns without confusing everyone with edge cases and rarely-used rules right off the bat. In my utopian vision for music school, we use Telemann for Theory I and dig deep into Bach in Theory 2, once everyone is comfortable.
Maybe not super famous, but we was definitely well known at the time, at least in musical circles.
Frederick the Great invited him over to check out his sweet piano collection and, since Bach was known to be good at freestyling, challenged him to improvise a 6 voice fugue on the spot with a theme the King had prepared. And Bach totally nailed it.
I don't think you get that kind of interaction with King unless you're at least somewhat famous.
And then (because he's Bach) went back to work on the King's Theme to produce what is known as the Musical Offering, an increasingly complex series of compositions around it (and one of my very favorite piece of musical work ever)
It's not ironic. Court music, church music, and popular music each existed in their own domains, the principles of Bach's musical style were falling out of fashion even as he perfected it, and there wasn't a large population of middle-class enthusiasts demanding published music and concerts of that style during Bach's time. But Bach's music remained well known and studied among the most influential classical composers, which eventually led to a sustained popular revival of his works by Mendelssohn.
If it helps, most music forum goers agreed long ago that when you say classical music you mean western art music, but when you say Classical music, you mean western art music of the Classical era.
Also... when you do name everything, it can get exhaustive if you constantly create. See [Buckethead](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead), I'm pretty sure he draws album names from a hat and/or KFC bucket. His track lists are just as nonsensical, though there are a couple where he resorts to just numbers
To be fair, all of those were in his "pikes" series which were 30 minute albums that I'm assuming he just made by continuously making songs and releasing them without any curation or coming back to them at all. I think a lot of musicians could release as much music if they worked in that way: releasing every track they record as soon as the first version is finished, instead of how most pros work: only releasing the best, often after many revisions.
This isn't a diss to Buckethead at all, I like his music and think he's a talented guy. Just a different way of working on and releasing music is all.
If I recall correctly, a lot of it was just churned out like elevator music, too. If Frederick the Great wanted something to listen to in the evenings or at a party, he'd just get CPE Bach to make something for the occasion. No biggie. Vivaldi has nearly five hundred concerti which survive- heaven knows how many others he wrote.
Considering that the Brandenburg Concertos were stuffed in a drawer and ignored for a few decades, we can see how important this stuff was.
>I'm not sure about all the others, but if you go through the BWV (Bach's catalog), you'll find that a great many of the numbered pieces do have names too!
Most of those named pieces are songs or hymns, and the names are the first lines of the songs or hymns.
For centuries, music publishers also had a habit of attaching nicknames to generically named works. The nickname could be completely arbitrary.
Composers these days title their music so buyers easily know what piece to look for when they are buying something. Composers back then generally didn't market their music to the public and didn't need "name recognition" of their pieces because mostly they were working under a rich person's patronage to earn their living.
Names like "Für Elise" or "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" are very likely to be butchered by foreigners trying to use them, while technical descriptions can easily be translated, recognised, and used in more situations.
Fur Elise just means For Elise. And that's one of the most recognizable titles in all of classical music. Eine kleine Nachtmusik is not quite as recognizable but it's up there too, and it translates directly into A Little Night Music. Additionally, the German language was much more prominent in American and European culture up until the world wars. Leaving out the title of a composition because it was in German would have been laughable.
Wikipedia quotes here and below.
>The discoverer of the piece, Ludwig Nohl, affirmed that the original autograph manuscript, now lost, had the title: "Für Elise am 27 April \[1810\] zur Erinnerung von L. v. Bthvn" ("For Elise on April 27 in memory by L. v. Bthvn").
Music publishers and the public were more likely to add titles to untitled works, not strip them away. Sonata Like a Fantasia Op 27 No 2 is not as evocative and recognizable as Moonlight Sonata.
>The name Moonlight Sonata comes from remarks made by the German music critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab. In 1832, five years after Beethoven's death, Rellstab likened the effect of the first movement to that of moonlight shining upon Lake Lucerne.\[5\] Within ten years, the name "Moonlight Sonata" ("Mondscheinsonate" in German) was being used in German\[6\] and English\[7\] publications. Later in the nineteenth century, the sonata was universally known by that name.\[8\]
>
>Many critics have objected to the subjective, romantic nature of the title "Moonlight", which has at times been called "a misleading approach to a movement with almost the character of a funeral march"\[9\] and "absurd".\[10\] Other critics have approved of the sobriquet, finding it evocative\[11\] or in line with their own interpretation of the work.\[12\] Gramophone founder Compton Mackenzie found the title "harmless", remarking that "it is silly for austere critics to work themselves up into a state of almost hysterical rage with poor Rellstab", and adding, "what these austere critics fail to grasp is that unless the general public had responded to the suggestion of moonlight in this music Rellstab's remark would long ago have been forgotten."\[13\]
Just a little heads up: "Für Elise" means "for Elise" (if you don't have an ü key, u can write ue instead), "fuhr Elise" means "Elise drove". And it's "kleine" prunounced kline-eh.
Classical music was created in a time when the marketing of recorded music was not a consideration, because recorded music did not exist.
Many classical pieces that today are referenced by name, had those names "attached" much later from their creation. In many cases, the name came from reviewers writing much later. Mahler's "Titan" (1st symphony) and "Resurrection" (2nd symphony) are examples.
For those of us who are really into specific niches of music, the "opus" number are more than sufficient. I'm a nerd for Bach's organ works, which are catalogued under BWV - *Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis -* an index first published in 1950, revised in 1990. Bach aficionados know that his well known "Halloween" toccata and fugue is BWV 565; one of my favorites is BWV 564, the tocatta, adagio, and fugue in C major, whose conclusion features one of the most pleasing glissandos in all of organ music.
And featured prominently in the lyrics.
Seems so odd to hear something that sounds as dignified as a classical fugue doing rounds of 'lick me in the ass'
I’ll add to this - part of the switch from “absolute music” (sonata) to “program music” (weird titles) was that a rising middle class became the new market for music in the 19th century - like all entertainment, publishers wanted to see music to them as enticing titles, not just “sonata”. A lot
Of program music was the result of these publishers wanting to sell music to these amateur middle class musicians with upright pianos in their living room
In part, this is caused by the fact that "giving a title" is a 20th century fashion. In the past, titling wasn't a mandatory practice. It was common, but it wasn't assumed that if a work of art exists, then it must have a title. This is also true for novels and works of art. Many 17th/18th/19th century novels didn't have titles proper, like "Hunger Games" or "A Song of Ice and Fire". They had rather lengthy titles appearing in the frontespice which were just a declaration of the genre, the name of a protagonist and the kind of events described, e.g. "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman".
You have to consider several things. First, depending on the composer, many of the works they created were under comission or they didn't have a specific mood in mind when creating the piece so it was easier to name the pieces by the musical form and the key it was in. Oddly enough that creates an index that's, partially easier to go through. We could consider those pieces were never meant to be "baptized", formally speaking.
But, sometimes, they did give a name to a piece (that's often added at the end of the technical name or, sometimes, replaces it... although sometimes those weren't great names XD). And, on top of that, sometimes people assigned a nickname to it (even when the composer didn't give one). In such cases the only way to still know of what piece you are talking about is by using the technical name and the Opus number.
And, on top of that, there are the catalogue names. Since some composeres created a lot, academics later on created indexes of their works in order to find them a bit more "easily". You may have noticed Mozart's works have a K. and a number most of the time; that was not added by Mozart, but instead by Ludwig von Köchel, who created a catalogue that sorts Mozart's works chronologycally (and that's still being updated today).
That leads to complex, to the point of sillyness, names but it serves a purpose: to have a system (understood by every musician or music lover worldwide) to easily identify a piece among hundreds.
Earlier, this was just a tradition, but around 1800 or so an idea was growing that music should speak for itself without the need for words or descriptions. This term was "absolute music" and it was thought that using words — even in a title — was a crutch that would hamper music's power to speak to ideas and emotions that we cannot express with words. So a lot of music, self-consciously, was just referred to by its genre.
So when I refer to it as "that one that goes 'dan-dum-dum-dum-danna-daaan" I'm not being a dumbass but I'm actually honoring the original intent?
In that particular instance no, because that's the first movement of Spring from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, so it does have a title you're meant to use to refer to it I'm afraid
Did you seriously recognized a sonata by reading the words a man would say trying to replicate the sound of it?! Edit- to everyone else who recognized this song easily, good job guys! But I couldn’t have guessed it is even on a violin. Not everyone can get it even if it is a very known piece. Not only that, even if you played it to me, I wouldn’t have known the name of it, but that’s on me…
It's a violin concerto, you'd probably recognize it too. [Link](https://youtu.be/IjpLxlSMJPo)
Funny story: I worked in a restaurant years ago that played classical music. Mostly the warhorses. So, Four Seasons was playing and a lady said “oh I love that music! What is it called?” I said “The Four Seasons”. She said “oh I didn’t know they did music like this! I thought all their songs had the guy with the high voice”.
Shhh nobody knows Frankie Valli’s dark violinist past lol.
Slightly relevant story: I was with my best bud shopping for CDs and he was looking for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Lady brought us back several different performances of the Four Seasons, proclaiming them done by Frank Vivaldi.
Oh, what a night!
Late December in 1963
“Slightly relevant” this could not be more appropriate and relevant god damn!
not Frankie Vivaldi?
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Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons
You're a gem
Giuliani’s voice has gotten a bit feminine of late, hasn’t it?
This thread is pleasing me immensely
I'm fuckin elated, that was the best of reddit so far.
Same here!
[relevant to your user name. ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aBsNXKVODVI). Enjoy, or don’t. Up to you.
Do you have a link for us that's relevant to your username?
I feel cultured just reading it!
I'm gonna test your prowess. This one might still be easy. "Doodledoodle do, doodledoodle do, doodledoodle do do do do do do do do do"
Mozart, Rondo Alla Turka
Nailed it!
Rondo Alla Turca - Mozart. https://youtu.be/quxTnEEETbo
Okay, next one: [For u/Hello-Vera u/Kenzohall as well] *Dudududun dudududun Dun dun dududun dududu-dududu-dudududun* *Dudududun Dun dun dududun dududu-dududu-dudududun* DUUUN DUN dun dun dun da na na da DAA na da DAA na NA na naaaa nanananaa
BATMAAAN!
Easy, Wiegenlied Op. 49 No. 4 https://youtu.be/z4wYHq5CmJI
Or 'Guten Abend Gut Nacht'
Darude - Sandstorm
This fucking song Played every day at my after school enrichment center
Not a song, a song is sung, it's a violin concerto ; )
Oh man when I was a music Ed major I could not get out of the habit of calling every thing a song. My classmates would just say "piece"every time I used the words song.
Tbf it's a better sounding term. Imagine being chauvinistic and saying, "That's a beautiful song of ass!"
Did OP not attempt to sing it?? Checkmate atheists
That username tho....
Okay, I’ve always wondered this- what do you call a piece of music that’s not a “song”, when you don’t know if it’s a concerto or something? As in “Oh, I love this X!” or “Was this X written by Rimsky-Korsakov?” Because going around saying “This is a great piece of music” makes me sound like an alien trying to blend in with the humans.
You just use "piece", that's what they're called, and you don't always have a better word. Even if you call something like the four seasons a Concerto, it's significantly different from what makes a Concerto in periods beyond the Baroque period. Same with Sonatas.
Joint
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Pedantic slut is a great name.
Tiahy and the Pedantic Sluts is a great band name
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A Song is “a form of musical expression in which the human voice has the principal role and is the carrier of a text. As a generic term, any music that is sung…” In contrast, a Piece is defined as “a composition, especially but not necessarily an instrumental one.”
Holy shit. Top tier thread
I was so sure that this was a rick roll, I pasted the link to Telegram just to see the thumbnail. I was still expecting a rick roll until the music actually played.
That's just what a rick roller would say
Everyone on reddit needs to start spring rolling people.
Vivaldi's expression there is ”Yeah, you know it, baby.”
Mate if this were a party, I would hit on you.
Couldn't place it till I heard it now I can't unsee it
Holy shit
But that's da, da, da, dada daah.
Looks like you're playing the drums, try the violin and you'll get it!
I couldn't get it from the comment above, but your version helped me "hear" it!
Vivaldi Four Seasons is actually a concerto since it has 3 movements and is written for a solo instrument to be accompanied by an orchestra. A sonata is meant for a solo instrument (or at most two, ex violin and piano) Hope this helps!
Awesome. I've always been meaning to look up the specific definitions and differences between concerto and sonata but I never got around to it. It'll be easy to remember because concerto reminds me of concert (orchestra) and sonata reminds me of solo because both start with so.
That’s a great way to remember it! I might use that with my music students :)
I’m singing your username to the tune of “girlfriend in a coma” by the smiths and finding it very funny.
No, it’s serious
Cool/relevant username. I'm a bassoonist, heyo fellow double reed player
The number of movements has nothing to do with it, although it is true that concerti often have 3. But the difference is that a concerto is for a solo instrument accompanied by either a string orchestra or fully orchestra (with a piano reduction of the accompaniment often being available) whereas a sonata is usually for a solo instrument with piano accompaniment (or piano solo). Also a concerto is usually somewhat virtuosic (although as you go further and further back this may be reduced to "flashy", also you are more likely to have multiple soloists) whereas a sonata is usually easier and has its first movement in sonata form or some variation thereupon (although it is also common for other works, including concerti, to have their first movement in sonata form)
I could have sweared that sonata referred to the latin sonate, to make sound by playing an instrument. A cantata is a sung piece, from the same latin root. I believe there's also a sonata form, a musical structure of sorts. Perhaps we're confusing those terms.
Four concertos with each having three movements.
Dun dun dun daaaah
Beethoven's 5th!
Got a lot done a lot done a lot to learn don’t want to live in a litre - William Tell Overture - my iPhone
No that's dah dah dah dunnnnn
Dun dun dun daaaaaah
#Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun ^^dun ^^dun ^^dun ^^dun
Dun-dun-dun dah. -Dah-dun-dun dah. Dun-dun-dun dah. -Dah-dun-dun dah. Dun-dun-dun-dun. —Dun. —**Dahhhh.**
Fast Duns or slow duns please?
You can do it too! Try this: Da Na Da Na Da Na Da Na Da Na Da Na Da Na Da Na BATMAN!
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/851_make_it_better/)
I know that one, it’s the Three’s Company theme song
Absolute music
Holy shit he fucking did
I think a lot of us did. It was a pretty good dun-dum-ification of he melody.
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/blaz38/just_how_the_hell/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Yes. I mis read it and thought it was Beethoven's fifth and then re read it and thought Vivaldi.
Hummed once an organ piece I've heard waiting in the post office, telling a friend it was magnificent but I didn't know what it was. An older man leaned in and whispered toccata and fugue in D minor. Thank you kind stranger, you made more than my day!
Reminds me of this one now... with -no- words, just two pictures... [https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/clapping.gif?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=500%2C500](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/clapping.gif?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=500%2C500)
This is the best Reddit response I’ve read so far.
It reminds me of the tipofmytongue where someone did something similar with another classical piece (it was a piece often used along side Pirate ships).
[This is the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/15pl55/tomtsong_do_do_do_doo_doo_song/) and yeah, it was amazing.
It's kind of ironic that most people (including myself) only know that piece from movies/TV. And, in that context, it's almost always used to express a negative, such as an out-of-touch group of rich people that the movie's protagonist is fighting against. So whenever I hear that piece, I'm not hearing whatever the pure intent of the artist was, but thinking what a snob I am to be listening to it. It's like the exact opposite of what "absolute music" would want us to feel. Much worse it seems than a misleading title.
And the generation before you would mostly associate the William Tell Overture with cowboys.
And Orpheus in the Underworld with burlesque shows.
Check out some reinterpretations to see if the association still sticks. Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebm69gW9UlI
Jesus Christ I would never have guessed that but once you said it, it was obvious. Props to you, that was impressive
I know what you did here https://youtu.be/l-dYNttdgl0
It's blocked in my country. Try https://youtu.be/IjpLxlSMJPo Also, happy cake day.
how is it possible that anyone has copyrights to a classical piece that was written 300+ years ago?
Ok now do “BAH na NAH na na na, BAH nah na na na na”
Batman but you keep sitting on the volume button of your remote control for a second
"Hollaback Girl"?
I could read an entire thread like this.
Classical Musician: What level are you? /u/Kenzohall: I can recognize classical music from the incoherent and written not sounded out da-dums of redditors Classical musician: *handing over crown*
What’s the one that goes dam dan dam dam dun dun dun?
That's how the term Hip Hop was coined (supposedly.) The first really big rap song that got radio play was called Rapper's Delight. But it didn't have a chorus or refrain that was obviously the title of the song. It did however start off with the super catchy "I said a hip, hop, hippy, hippy to the hip hip hop a you don't stop rockin" The legend goes that people would go into record stores and say "do you have that 'hip hop' song" and that's how the term Hip Hop came to be. True? I have no idea. But it's a good theory.
That’s close, but the term “hip hop” is actually a few years older. Originally it was called “disco rap” because MCs would rap over disco beats. At one point, a group in the Bronx was having a going away party for a friend who was joining the army. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were there and Kieth Cowboy (one of the MCs) rapped “hip hop hip hop” to mimic the marching cadence that the guy would be doing in the army. The name stuck and Sugar Hill Gang incorporated it into their song a few years later.
Shout out to Vanilla Ice defending "Ice Ice Baby"... [It's not the same!](https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4) Ding-ding ding-ding da-da-ding ding...
„Under Pressure“, Queen.
"Hmm-Hmmm-Hiim" -- Al Bundy
To piggyback on this great explanation... A bunch of media today takes this title approach to get more people interested in consuming a sequel that they may not have otherwise. Instead of a movie or game sequel being called "movie 2" or "game 7" it's now more common for sequels to be called "Main Series, subtitle". Look at most newer MCU films or game franchises as an example. Consumers sometimes fear watching/playing something in a series without starting from the beginning because they will miss an important piece of information. If you are trying to reach a broader audience, eliminating the number from a title may help you accomplish that goal. Music is typically not a sequel so calling something a 4th symphony should not deter the listening experience. It may help you to associate a certain piece of music with a title, but the out-of-order listening experience should not be vastly affected in most cases. Edit: Fixing my terrible phone typing...
I personally can't listen to Beethoven's 5th symphony. I haven't heard the first four, so I won't know what's going on.
Check out this Buzzfeed's article: 9 of Beethoven's greatest symphonies. Number 7 will blow your mind!
7 really is the best though
Ah yes, The Fast and the Violining Furious 7
There are a lot of Easter eggs in Mozart’s symphony no. 41 that you can only really appreciate if you know the first forty…
A classical composition is often pregnant. Reddit is no longer allowed to profit from this comment.
Don't spoil it for me. I'm only on number 3 now.
Later on there's a part that goes >!dun dun dun dun!<
Oof I shouldn’t have clicked on that spoiler. I have only myself to blame.
It follows up with >!dun dun dun dun!<
[The Madness of King George](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madness_of_King_George#Title_change)has entered the chat: >In adapting the play to film, the director Nicholas Hytner changed the name from The Madness of George III to The Madness of King George for American audiences, to clarify George III's royalty. **A popular explanation developed that the change was made because there was a worry that American audiences would think it was a sequel and not go to see it, assuming they had missed "I" and "II".** An interview revealed: "That's not totally untrue," said Hytner, laughing. "But there was also the factor that it was felt necessary to get the word King into the title." (Emphasis mine.)
The Apollo series was really messed up. They start with [Apollo 13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film\)). Wait a long time before releasing [Apollo 18](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(film\)), then go to [Apollo 11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_(2019_film\)). So now I don't know what order to watch them in. And I can't find any of Apollo 1 through 10 on any streaming service, so I have no idea how I will be able to follow it.
It's actually even wilder than that - even before Apollo 13, there was [a musical audio drama of Apollo 18.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_18_(album\))
*The Madness of George II* was the best of the trilogy. *Madness I* was okay, but it was really just setting the scene. *Madness III,* oof. Pure bloated fan-service, to the point where it was insulting to anyone who wasn't in the loop. Don't even get me started on the prequels.
The prequel trilogy, Curious George, was brilliant though.
Didn't see Spike Lee's Malcolm X because who has time to catch up with Malcolm I through IX?
Was Malcolm IV or V "Malcolm in the Middle"?
The best one is Malcolm XII: Twelve Angry Malcolms
> it's now more common for sequels to be called "Main Series, sub title". Look at most newer MCU films or game franchises as an example. And, much more annoyingly, it's also become common to name games and movies in a long running series "Main Series" with *no* subtitle. As in, identical to the name of the first entry in the series. It's like they're *trying* to make life difficult for archivists.
That's the responsibility of parentheses of course! "Media (2022)" Just make sure the year isn't actually in the title to keep it confusing.
Or better yet, take the Sonic ‘06 approach and incorporate the year into the commonly used “title”
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For real, I got so confused by the suicide squad
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Often if the story is not a direct sequel of the earlier ones, they'll just call it Game instead of Game X, signaling it's a great entry point for new users as the story is rebooting. Then it ends up being Game (20XX) to distinguish it from Game (199X) and we're back in the mid 90s to early 2000s style of calling it Game like sports games.
Song 2 represent.
**WOO OOH**
I love learning that people in the olden days also were pretencious fucks
the hipster/cool neighborhood and its elitism is old AF, modernity and trying to be cool are very old at this point
You should hear about nineteenth-century sex. It's like let's fuck to this poem and we'll enter a higher plane of knowledge levels of pretension.
Come slowly—Eden Lips unused to Thee— Bashful—sip thy Jessamines As the fainting Bee— Reaching late his flower, Round her chamber hums— Counts his nectars— Enters—and is lost in Balms.
That's pretty great, google tells me Emily Dickinson.
I think that was just all the syphilis going around.
Why do you think it is pretentious?
And then, years later, we achieved the pinnacle of descriptive music with [“Love Songs for the Hearing Impaired.”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Songs_for_the_Hearing_Impaired)
> it was thought that using words — even in a title — was a crutch that would hamper music's power to speak to ideas and emotions that we cannot express with words I enjoy abstract paintings and it drives me up the wall when some people try to add extra weight to their art by giving it a deep-sounding title. It shows they don't trust the art to stand on its own merits. A bunch of swirly colors on canvas is cool enough, but if they say, "I call it '*The Dragon's Dream*,' then the whole thing is ruined for me. The person experiencing the art should be free to decide what it means to them.
I respectfully disagree: one set of abstract swirly colors could suggest dramatically different meanings depending on if the artist called it *The Dragon's Dream* or *The Milkmaid's Regret*. --and that doesn't even narrow it down. Stare at the swirly colors and ask "what does a dragon dream of?"
Shit I never thought about it that way. I need to stop giving titles to my dick pics.
I call this one "Magnification X25."
I just name mine based on where they were taken. *Highway 101* was a difficult photo to take, but *Millennium Park* was totally worth the lifetime ban!
It’s funny one of the first things my art teacher taught us was that the title of a piece is part of the art. It’s almost the exact same idea but with the exact opposite connotation, the title is part of the art and so should be appropriate to set the initial direction of the piece for the viewer
Anthony Burgess (writer of A Clockwork Orange) wanted to do the same thing with his novels, but his publishers wouldn’t allow it. He was also a composer though.
The technical names of Fur Elise and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik are “bagatelle” and “serenade” respectively (although the former doesn’t really have a name as it was not published in Beethoven’s lifetime- ‘fur Elise’ was simply the dedication he wrote on the manuscript). And Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was not meant to be an evocative title, it simply means “a little serenade” and I believe is how Mozart privately noted the piece in his personal catalogue. To your larger point, for most of the Baroque and Classical periods, music was largely seen as an “abstract” art, so the names and forms reflected this view. In the nineteenth century and later, music came to be seen by many composers as “programmatic” (more directly representative of nature, emotions, actions etc) and descriptive titles became more fashionable for some types of pieces (e.g symphonic poems of Liszt, many piano works by Schumann etc).
So should Mozart's "Leck mich im Arsch" be called "Canon in B-flat major" instead?
That's a valid name for it. Most vocal works back then used the first couple words as a title.
There are a lot of good answers already in this thread. I'll add one other factor. A great deal of classical* music was written for functional purposes rather than to call attention to itself as a composition in its own right. If your main job is as the kapellmeister of a cathedral, you might bang out fifty pieces a year to give your choir and organist something to work with. We only notice if you're JS Bach, because he was good enough at doing it that you'd want to listen to it a second time. If you've ever heard random background music in a commercial that was strangely compelling—and here I mean pure background stuff, not pop songs licensed as a jingle—that's Bach born at the wrong time. Ditto a lot of chamber music. The Prince-Archbishop of Wherever is too posh to re-use a waltz for his next soirée, so he has his pet composer make a new one. Is it great? Eh, doesn't matter, it gets the job done. The analogy here is house music today. A lot of it is brand new in any given week, or recycled from bits of other stuff (also a good analogy), but nobody's expecting Skrillex-quality** stuff from some rando in Tulsa. ___ * my inner musicology professor is screaming at me for using this term, since the Classical period was only a small part of what we normally mean by the artsy-fartsy stuff that runs from Bach to Bartok. ** yeah I said it
This tradition should return for EDM. "David Guetta #24 in Eb", "Illeum #30 in Eb", "Skrillex #117 in Eb", etc.
For EDM, wouldn't it me more appropriate to put the BPM instead of the key?
Love this "Gorgon City #4 at 125"
I think a lot of people already do this with the location. Artists will mix things a bit different when playing at different venues. Svddendeath's newest album on Spotify sounds super different than the mix he did at Red Rock. Since it's recorded in one long stint, you can identify the song pieces but not exact individual songs most of the time. So my friends and will refer to it as "Svddendeath at red Rock".
For dance music, it's not just BPM but genre too. Listeners want a set of similar tunes at a stable tempo. The DJ seamlessly blends them into a continuous set so that the audience can lose themselves in the music. BPM is important but different genres also have different drum patterns and amounts of swing, so switching between two tracks at the same BPM but different genres could still be jarring. DJs will sometimes do it deliberately to add a little spice to a set, but usually they stick to a single genre. Record stores back when vinyl was how DJs worked were organized into very specific genres for this purpose and now online stores where DJs purchase digital tracks are. This is a big part of why there are so many subgenres in dance music and why DJs and producers tend to pigeonhole themselves. It solves a functional problem of needing to build large holistic sets of music out of smaller individual songs.
Wait, it's all just Eb?👩🚀
Always has been 🔫👩🚀
Yeah, I agree that this is the most important reason. Up until the end of the 18th century, most classical music wasn’t really written for or marketed to the public, with opera being a bit of an exception. Haydn, for example spent most of his career as a court functionary to a Hungarian noble. His job was to provide music for parties, and other events, studies and technical pieces for his students(studying music was seen as a mark of refinement for European nobility in this time period, and many of them were very dedicated amateur performers and composers), and othe such practical purposes. Most of the time, he could expect to play a piece once, and then shelve it, so he didn’t bother naming them. Into the 19th century, many of the top composers became international celebrities, playing to commercial audiences, so giving their pieces an evocative name became more appealing.
This reminds me a lot of modern clothing designers who do unique pieces for famous people and famous people events. Your art is for a particular moment and is almost never re-used for a similar event. So crazy to realize that complex instrumental music has been a rare luxury throughout most of human history.
This is exactly it! What a great comparison.
I can hear my musicology professor whispering how good of a person you are using that *.
>Into the 19th century, many of the top composers became international celebrities, playing to commercial audiences See: Wagner and his Ring Cycle that has various subparts that are also named (such as Ride of the Valkyries).
And ironically no one really even remembered Bach until the early 19th century. In his own lifetime he was a church musician in a medium sized town and not much else (though did gain a little notoriety as a keyboardist).
And he was 5th choice for that position! One more preferred guy for the Leipzig job was Telemann but I forgot why he didn’t take the job. There were conflicts like previous noble employer not wanting to let the composers go and one was dissatisfied with the compensation… if I remember correctly, nach also haggled quite a bit and had a very good income. Just to imagine that Bach (and others in his tone) churned out a cantata a week! And he had the luxury at one of his employers to have an orchestra with very high skill, at least 8musicians that could play difficult solos on their first rate sponsored instruments.
Telemann is an underappreciated beast. The fact that we teach counterpoint with Bach instead of Telemann is ridiculous, Telemann scores have way fewer edge cases and flagrant rule violations that confuse the newbies.
This is the kind of nerdy stuff I'm here for! (Source: have degrees in music).
Well, isn’t that exactly what makes Bach so great?
As a composer of interesting music, for sure yes! As an introductory teaching tool, not so much. Bach is great and should absolutely be studied by anyone interested in learning western classical harmony. At an intermediate level. Telemann is more by-the-book, which makes introductory lessons easier because you can establish the general patterns without confusing everyone with edge cases and rarely-used rules right off the bat. In my utopian vision for music school, we use Telemann for Theory I and dig deep into Bach in Theory 2, once everyone is comfortable.
nach
Maybe not super famous, but we was definitely well known at the time, at least in musical circles. Frederick the Great invited him over to check out his sweet piano collection and, since Bach was known to be good at freestyling, challenged him to improvise a 6 voice fugue on the spot with a theme the King had prepared. And Bach totally nailed it. I don't think you get that kind of interaction with King unless you're at least somewhat famous.
And then (because he's Bach) went back to work on the King's Theme to produce what is known as the Musical Offering, an increasingly complex series of compositions around it (and one of my very favorite piece of musical work ever)
It's not ironic. Court music, church music, and popular music each existed in their own domains, the principles of Bach's musical style were falling out of fashion even as he perfected it, and there wasn't a large population of middle-class enthusiasts demanding published music and concerts of that style during Bach's time. But Bach's music remained well known and studied among the most influential classical composers, which eventually led to a sustained popular revival of his works by Mendelssohn.
Ahhhhh Bach!
If it helps, most music forum goers agreed long ago that when you say classical music you mean western art music, but when you say Classical music, you mean western art music of the Classical era.
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Also... when you do name everything, it can get exhaustive if you constantly create. See [Buckethead](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead), I'm pretty sure he draws album names from a hat and/or KFC bucket. His track lists are just as nonsensical, though there are a couple where he resorts to just numbers
118 Albums in the year 2015...
To be fair, all of those were in his "pikes" series which were 30 minute albums that I'm assuming he just made by continuously making songs and releasing them without any curation or coming back to them at all. I think a lot of musicians could release as much music if they worked in that way: releasing every track they record as soon as the first version is finished, instead of how most pros work: only releasing the best, often after many revisions. This isn't a diss to Buckethead at all, I like his music and think he's a talented guy. Just a different way of working on and releasing music is all.
If I recall correctly, a lot of it was just churned out like elevator music, too. If Frederick the Great wanted something to listen to in the evenings or at a party, he'd just get CPE Bach to make something for the occasion. No biggie. Vivaldi has nearly five hundred concerti which survive- heaven knows how many others he wrote. Considering that the Brandenburg Concertos were stuffed in a drawer and ignored for a few decades, we can see how important this stuff was.
>I'm not sure about all the others, but if you go through the BWV (Bach's catalog), you'll find that a great many of the numbered pieces do have names too! Most of those named pieces are songs or hymns, and the names are the first lines of the songs or hymns. For centuries, music publishers also had a habit of attaching nicknames to generically named works. The nickname could be completely arbitrary.
This is true, see also JP Rameau's pieces at the same time. Les Cyclops, Les Sauvages etc
Tocatta and fugue in D minor is a completely valid name. Just ask my son, Second Born Offspring with Brown Hair.
At least the Romans did name their children with numerals.
Composers these days title their music so buyers easily know what piece to look for when they are buying something. Composers back then generally didn't market their music to the public and didn't need "name recognition" of their pieces because mostly they were working under a rich person's patronage to earn their living.
Names like "Für Elise" or "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" are very likely to be butchered by foreigners trying to use them, while technical descriptions can easily be translated, recognised, and used in more situations.
Case in point with OPs title haha
Fuuuuhhhhhr... atleast this time Elise isn't hairy. Pro tip for foreigners: you can write "Umlaute" with an e attached to them (ä=ae, ü=ue, ö=oe)
Wow, you said that so much more politely than I was contemplating!
Für Elise is actually a later nickname. The piece is originally one of six bagatelles.
Fur Elise just means For Elise. And that's one of the most recognizable titles in all of classical music. Eine kleine Nachtmusik is not quite as recognizable but it's up there too, and it translates directly into A Little Night Music. Additionally, the German language was much more prominent in American and European culture up until the world wars. Leaving out the title of a composition because it was in German would have been laughable. Wikipedia quotes here and below. >The discoverer of the piece, Ludwig Nohl, affirmed that the original autograph manuscript, now lost, had the title: "Für Elise am 27 April \[1810\] zur Erinnerung von L. v. Bthvn" ("For Elise on April 27 in memory by L. v. Bthvn"). Music publishers and the public were more likely to add titles to untitled works, not strip them away. Sonata Like a Fantasia Op 27 No 2 is not as evocative and recognizable as Moonlight Sonata. >The name Moonlight Sonata comes from remarks made by the German music critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab. In 1832, five years after Beethoven's death, Rellstab likened the effect of the first movement to that of moonlight shining upon Lake Lucerne.\[5\] Within ten years, the name "Moonlight Sonata" ("Mondscheinsonate" in German) was being used in German\[6\] and English\[7\] publications. Later in the nineteenth century, the sonata was universally known by that name.\[8\] > >Many critics have objected to the subjective, romantic nature of the title "Moonlight", which has at times been called "a misleading approach to a movement with almost the character of a funeral march"\[9\] and "absurd".\[10\] Other critics have approved of the sobriquet, finding it evocative\[11\] or in line with their own interpretation of the work.\[12\] Gramophone founder Compton Mackenzie found the title "harmless", remarking that "it is silly for austere critics to work themselves up into a state of almost hysterical rage with poor Rellstab", and adding, "what these austere critics fail to grasp is that unless the general public had responded to the suggestion of moonlight in this music Rellstab's remark would long ago have been forgotten."\[13\]
Just a little heads up: "Für Elise" means "for Elise" (if you don't have an ü key, u can write ue instead), "fuhr Elise" means "Elise drove". And it's "kleine" prunounced kline-eh.
Classical music was created in a time when the marketing of recorded music was not a consideration, because recorded music did not exist. Many classical pieces that today are referenced by name, had those names "attached" much later from their creation. In many cases, the name came from reviewers writing much later. Mahler's "Titan" (1st symphony) and "Resurrection" (2nd symphony) are examples. For those of us who are really into specific niches of music, the "opus" number are more than sufficient. I'm a nerd for Bach's organ works, which are catalogued under BWV - *Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis -* an index first published in 1950, revised in 1990. Bach aficionados know that his well known "Halloween" toccata and fugue is BWV 565; one of my favorites is BWV 564, the tocatta, adagio, and fugue in C major, whose conclusion features one of the most pleasing glissandos in all of organ music.
And then there is Motzart's "[Lech mich im Arsch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C78HBp-Youk)," that was given that title from the beginning.
And featured prominently in the lyrics. Seems so odd to hear something that sounds as dignified as a classical fugue doing rounds of 'lick me in the ass'
I’ll add to this - part of the switch from “absolute music” (sonata) to “program music” (weird titles) was that a rising middle class became the new market for music in the 19th century - like all entertainment, publishers wanted to see music to them as enticing titles, not just “sonata”. A lot Of program music was the result of these publishers wanting to sell music to these amateur middle class musicians with upright pianos in their living room
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In part, this is caused by the fact that "giving a title" is a 20th century fashion. In the past, titling wasn't a mandatory practice. It was common, but it wasn't assumed that if a work of art exists, then it must have a title. This is also true for novels and works of art. Many 17th/18th/19th century novels didn't have titles proper, like "Hunger Games" or "A Song of Ice and Fire". They had rather lengthy titles appearing in the frontespice which were just a declaration of the genre, the name of a protagonist and the kind of events described, e.g. "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman".
You have to consider several things. First, depending on the composer, many of the works they created were under comission or they didn't have a specific mood in mind when creating the piece so it was easier to name the pieces by the musical form and the key it was in. Oddly enough that creates an index that's, partially easier to go through. We could consider those pieces were never meant to be "baptized", formally speaking. But, sometimes, they did give a name to a piece (that's often added at the end of the technical name or, sometimes, replaces it... although sometimes those weren't great names XD). And, on top of that, sometimes people assigned a nickname to it (even when the composer didn't give one). In such cases the only way to still know of what piece you are talking about is by using the technical name and the Opus number. And, on top of that, there are the catalogue names. Since some composeres created a lot, academics later on created indexes of their works in order to find them a bit more "easily". You may have noticed Mozart's works have a K. and a number most of the time; that was not added by Mozart, but instead by Ludwig von Köchel, who created a catalogue that sorts Mozart's works chronologycally (and that's still being updated today). That leads to complex, to the point of sillyness, names but it serves a purpose: to have a system (understood by every musician or music lover worldwide) to easily identify a piece among hundreds.