Mozart wrote a song called Leck mich im Arsch or ‘Lick me in the asshole’, a minute long song for six male voices―castrati preferred. He also loved ‘farted on‘ jokes. The oldest recorded joke from Sumeria is of this style.
Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.
Even Stravinsky, who is as dry as can be in his Poetics of Music, and dull to a T in his autobiography (as if he never farted on anybody), can’t resist making musical funnies. The classic Augurs chord from The Rite of Spring showcases Stravinsky’s unwitting wit. It is a dissonant double-chord, consisting of an E Major with an Eb Dominant Seventh chord on top. Easy to play on piano, it takes 2 or 3 guitarists to get.
Hilarious right? Mmm, quite.
This section of The Rite paraodies a basic I → IV chord progression, the classic progression of folk music. The first Augurs chord, a muddy E Major tonic, is accented in odd-time off-beat patterns by a second chord, a dissonant subdominant A Major. Over each chord hangs a displaced Eb Dominant 7th.
This is how someone with a completely abstract sense of humor makes a joke. He takes the chord progression you know and love and takes an E-flat Dominant shit on top of it. This little passage caused riots in 1913 when it premiered in Paris. The audience laughed and booed, and eventually erupted into fist-fights.
Spike Jones was inspired to pursue musical comedy after witnessing Stravinsky’s performance of The Firebird, where the conductor’s shoes, squished in time with his music. Frank Zappa―the sex magick love child of Spike Jones and Stravinsky―loved to quote from The Rite of Spring, for joke.
Later, the Augurs Chord predicted the birth of prog-rock, math-rock, fusion, and stoner what have you.
Maybe he’s just rolling because graves are so damn uncomfortable, or maybe Stravinsky actually finally gets his own joke. Or maybe the Devil hath farted on and on.
Epilogue Plug:
Wrong of Spring for the Casiotone MT-46
that wrong is so right!
I don’t get the funny. And where’s the progression? I can only see/hear one chord.
Dear Jørgen,
The progression is very subtle, but you can hear it better if you listen to the actual clip from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring . The first chord is an Ebdom7 with an E major on the bottom. The second chord is an Ebdom7 with an A major on the bottom. Try playing around with the 2 widgets in this post and you’ll hear the subtle difference between the 2 chords.
I suppose it’s not “ha ha” funny, but I believe Stravinsky was attempting to parody a simple I → IV chord progression, in a quasi-humorous fashion.
This is just one of those where I completely understand the workings, but can’t for my life see the humor. I feel so left out right now :o
That’s ok Jørgen. I’ll keep trying to make you laugh.
Rite of Spring is like Stravinsky’s blues. He takes a lot of simple folk and pop music ideas and basically ‘farts on’ them, as in the example above. The One to Four Chord Progression (E to A) is probably the most popular chord progression of all time, and here Stravinsky farts on it, by harmonizing it polytonally (Ebdom7), except he was dead serious at the time. He wasn’t trying to make a funny, but when people first heard this song in 1913, they laughed at it, and rightly so, because it is hilarious.
Aha, thanks for the insight! I haven’t heard it in a long time, and I didn’t know where he got his ideas from, or the background for this work. I’ll have a listen tonight. Thanks for your awesome blog!
Great article. :)
Though I’ve got to ask – in which bars/rehearsal numbers do we hear this A/Eb polychord? I know the Petrushka polychord chord is basically the same transposed – two major chords separated by a tritone – the old ‘diabolus’ of music.
Dear Mal,
The Chords in question occur around measure 90 in “The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls” section. The article contains a clip of this section. The A/Eb polychord is heard on the accented beats (mostly up-beats), while the E/Eb polychord fills out the rest of the beats.
And yes, you’re correct, the Petrushka Chord is essentially the same thing, except in Rite of Spring, the A/Eb polychord has the Eb dominant 7th (Db).
Thank you for your feedback.