Sunday Silliness

Sunday Silliness: Musical Appreciation

I heard this years ago on an old cassette tape that someone gave me as a birthday present, and it just blew me away. It is so silly, and so unusual, but still has an incredibly clever musicological streak running through it. Perhaps some of it is lost on me due to my lack of baseball knowledge, but it is very entertaining and informative, and worth the almost nine minutes of the video. If you really don’t have time you can skip the introduction and start at 52 seconds in.

Right, so this is a performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, but treated as a huge sporting occasion: there are roaring crowds, pregame rituals, and a couple of very excitable commentators offering player stats (not my pun), discussion of form (ditto) and a blow-by-blow account of what is going on.

As a side note: the man behind the whole thing is Professor Peter Schickele, a musicologist and composer, who often pretends to be P.D.Q Bach, and is one of the cleverest and silliest classical musicians around.