# Perverse composers and what they did



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A thread for composers doing strange, impolite, unethical, or simply thoughtless things -- in their music, please, otherwise the thread would be way too long. Anything from pirating another's work to dedicating a work unfairly. Or selling it twice (you listening, Ludwig?) Or...whatever.

I'll start with Debussy. When he wrote his String Quartet, he specified that it be published as Opus 10. Which was OK, except that he hadn't written Opp. 1 through 9. He just wanted to look like he was an old hand at this sort of thing.

Must not have worked because he never used an opus number again.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

One only has to establish the _old hand_ reputation once?

In the piano work Out Of Doors, Bartók created a strangeness. The final piece may present (in the ear of the listener) an environment in the undergrowth, after sundown. There is a chase, hunter and hunted, complete with result. The strangeness is in the ambiguity presented to the listener: is she listening to the mind of the hunted? Or is it the hunter?

[This a a form of 'selling it twice']


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

John Cage's Organ2/ASLSP. Designed to be played as slow as possible. There is a performance going on right now that began in 2001, and it's not going to end for over 600 years. Not SUPPOSED to, anyway. Obviously this would categorize as strange.

The film composer James Horner often plagiarized work from other classical composers. Perhaps the most striking example is from his Star Trek III score; in the track "Destruction of the Enterprise" he rather blatantly rips off Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.


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## Guest (May 21, 2016)

That C# in the cellos and basses in LvB's Eoica, 1st movement, opening theme (in E-flat). Damn, it has perplexed many a scholar since its inception. Very perverse, if you ask me.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

^There are lots of other little "perversions" in that symphony and almost all Beethoven form then on too. But, yes, this one is groundbreaking.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Erik Satie was always being impolite. Like in the second movement of Desiccated Embryos, he parodies Chopin's famous funeral march, then labels it as a mazurka by Schubert. In Croquis et agaceries d'un Gros Bohnomme in Bois, he mangles Chabrier's Espana and calls it Espanana. And Clementi's Sonatina gets ripped apart in his Sonata Bureaucratique.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

Wagner wrote Tristan Und Isolde in such a way that it can be seen a prolonged case of coitus interruptus. The actual climax comes only in the Liebestod at the end of the opera. This was something that was appreciated by audiences of the time. That is one of the reasons that Tristan und Isolde was considered by some at the time as immoral music.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Satie again - his _Trois morceaux en forme de poire_ consists of seven pieces, not three.


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

drpraetorus said:


> Wagner wrote Tristan Und Isolde in such a way that it can be seen a prolonged case of coitus interruptus.


... Tantris sex!


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## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

Sinfonia Domestica


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

dgee said:


> Sinfonia Domestica


What are you suggesting? :lol:


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