Trickery's Eternal Return

Classical music is a largely humorless enterprise, save for the illustrious oeuvre of P.D.Q. Bach.  Perhaps academia is to blame, or perhaps composers fearful of their reputation among the pompous and vindictive, but either way classical jokes are few and far between (and often not funny).  One of the most prolific classical humorists, Joseph Haydn, wrote the "Surprise" symphony, wherein loud orchestral hits interject quiet passages, and this was considered the height of classical trickery for some time.  There's also that guy who wrote a piece for each key of the piano exactly once, but it's humor value lies in how much you care about how many keys a piano has and how important serialism is to your life.  In this mire of stiffness one device has cropped up not once but three times in leaf form, each time separated by decades of time and composer M.O.'s - and we're looking at all three today.  With the image above in mind, take a wild guess what it is.

(Click for larger view)

See it?

As you can probably guess, repeat signs are usually followed by more music, or at least have another ending as to give the section closure.  Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) was a charming and clever lad, and many of his works exude a sunny smile, one that would shine across the works of Debussy and Ravel.  His Petite Valse may not seem that odd at first glance, but that repeat sign gives it a snickering new dimension.  As the bar is the dominant ending to the phrase, it wants to lean to the tonic, and the pickup note leads back to the first bar.  However, there is no exit - following the score forces infinite repetition.  The pianist Georges Rabol decided that if he was to circle around the mulberry bush he was at least going to put an octave jump in there for yucks.

It's an elegant trap, and recalls a scene from Animal Crackers:

And if Chabrier could do it, Erik Satie (1866-1924) could certainly up the ante.  Satie was one of the most eccentric and enigmatic composers in history, and his extensive piano oeuvre includes such gems as Pièces froides and Embryons desséchés (I'll let you translate that).  His superb piano set Sports et Divertessements is one of his most extensive and varied works, and near the set's end this appears:

(Click for larger view)

If you'll tear your eyes from the beautiful fountain penmanship for a second, you'll notice that symbol at the end of the score, and the lack of a double bar.  The symbol means that you go back to where it appears earlier in the score, and that just so happens to be the very beginning.  When Satie calls something Le Tango perpétual you'd better believe he means it.  It's the most famous of the three by far, and Satie's influence ensured at least one direct Tango descendant (but we'll get to that later).  YouTube's scrolling score project illuminates how the Devil's preferred music is the path to madness.

If one were asked to name the most humorless composer of all you couldn't give a much better answer than Anton Webern (1883-1945), the master of serial purity and smile suppression.  His mature style is so spare and emotionally cold you'd be hard pressed to find a jokey moment in all that empty space.  With that in mind, there may be a reason he left off the opus number for his 1924 Kinderstück.

(Click for larger view)

Is "lovely" really the most appropriate mood for this piece?  "Quizzical" seems more apt, and it shall remain quizzical to me because I'm of the opinion that life is too short to divine the root collection of serial pieces without good reason (it's not palindromic, that's for sure).  I can see some humor here, what with the "lovely" at the top and the bubbling texture in the meat of the thing, but I can't see the appeal for children, if that's at all what Webern had in mind.  And ultimately, it's that dang stinger under the last bar that cements this piece in the joke rep, the one at the start of this article, and the one that the pianist in the recording below chooses to ignore - but he does squeeze a heck of a lot of charm into his go at it.  Perhaps rather than asking the question of "Why the repeat?" should we be asking "How can we use the repeat to our advantage?"  The problem is that every time I get an answer to one I come back to the other.

~PNK