It's amazing what students of music can come up with. <P><B>Musical Mis-Education:</B> <P>“Agnus Dei was a woman composer famous for her church music.”<P>“Refrain means don't do it. A refrain in music is the part you better not try to sing.” <P>“A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.”<P>“Johann Sebastian Bach died from 1750 to the present.”<P>“Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was rather large.”<P>“Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling him. I guess he could not hear so good.” <P>“Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died from this.” <P>“Henry Purcell is a well-known composer few people have ever heard of.” <P>“Aaron Copland is one of your most famous contemporary composers. It is unusual to be contemporary. Most composers do not live until they are dead.”<P>“The most prolific composer is Anon. He wrote a song in every genre, language and period.”<P>“An opera is a song of bigly size.” <P>“In the last scene of Pagliacci, Canio stabs Nedda who is the one he really loves. Pretty soon Silvio also gets stabbed, and they all live happily ever after.”<P>“When a singer sings, he stirs up the air and makes it hit any passing eardrums. But if he is good, he knows how to keep it from hurting.” <P>“Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel.” <P>“I know what a sextet is but I would rather not say.” <P>“Caruso was at first an Italian. Then someone heard his voice and said he would go a long way. And so he went to America.” <P>“A good orchestra is always ready to play if the conductor steps on the odium.” <P>“Most authorities agree that music of antiquity was written long ago.” <P>“My very best liked piece of music is the Bronze Lullaby.”<P>“My favorite composer is Opus.”<P>“A harp is a nude piano.”<P>“A tuba is much larger than its name.” <P>“Instruments come in many sizes, shapes and orchestras.”<P>“You should always say celli when you mean there are two or more cellos.” <P>“Another name for kettle drums is timpani. But I think I will just stick with the first name and learn it good.”<P>“The double bass is also called the bass viol, string bass, and bass fiddle. It has so many names because it is so huge.”<P>“When electric currents go through them, guitars start making sounds. So would anybody.” <BR> <BR>“A bassoon looks like nothing I have ever heard.”<P>“Last month I found out how a clarinet works by taking it apart. I both found out and got in trouble.”<BR> <BR>“The concertmaster of an orchestra is always the person who sits in the first chair of the first violins. This means that when a person is elected concertmaster, he has to hurry up and learn how to play a violin real good.”<P>“For some reason, they always put a treble clef in front of every line of flute music. You just watch.”<P>“I can't reach the brakes on this piano!”<P>“The main trouble with a French horn is it's too tangled up.”<P>“Maria Callas was the greatest singer, but she couldn’t.” <P>“Anyone who can read all the instrument notes at the same time gets to be the conductor.” <P>“Instrumentalist is a many-purposed word for many player-types.” <P>“The flute is a skinny-high shape-sounded instrument. “<P>“The most dangerous part about playing cymbals is when it’s too near the nose.”<P>“A contra-bassoon is like a bassoon, only more so.” <P>“Tubas are a bit too much.”<P>“Orchestri is the plural for orchestra.”<BR> <BR>“It is easy to teach anyone to play the maracas. Just grip the neck and shake him in rhythm.”<P>“Just about any animal skin can be stretched over a frame to make a pleasant sound once the animal is removed.”<P>“In the sixteenth century, all female parts were sung by castrati. We don't know exactly what they sounded like because there are no known descendants.”<P>“In the olden days, a female singer was called pre-Madonna.”<P>“Tchaikovsky wrote the Cracknutter Suite.”<P>“Question: What is the correct name for kettle drums?<BR>Answer: Kettle drums.”<P>“Question: Is the saxophone a brass or a woodwind instrument?<BR>Answer: Yes.”<P><p>[This message has been edited by shazna (edited May 26, 2001).]

More....<P><B>Quotes:</B><BR> <BR>"Wagner's music has beautiful moments but some bad quarters of an hour." - Rossini<P>"Richard Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain<P>“I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.” - Charles Baudelaire <P>“Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and he usually means something nasty.” – James Huneker<P>“Is Wagner actually a man? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches falls ill; he has made music sick.” – Friedrich Nietzsche<P>When asked by the Pope what the Catholic Church could do for music, Igor Stravinsky is reputed to have answered without hesitation: "Give us back <I>castrati</I>!" <P>A peeved Puccini fan: “The only real Manon is Manon Lescaut. The ballet version is just Swamp Lake.” <P>“Hell is full of musical amateurs.” - George Bernard Shaw <P>“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” - Igor Stravinsky<P>“The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.” - Richard Wagner <P>Prokofiev, unsatisfied with the ending of his ballet Romeo and Juliet: “Living people can dance, the dying cannot!”<P>“There are two types of music. German music and bad music.” - H. L. Mencken <P>“Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of the ear.” – Claude Debussy<P>“Beethoven and Liszt have contributed to the advent of long hair.” – Louis Moreau Gottschalk<P>“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” – Igor Stravinsky<P>“Musicians take all the liberties they can.” – Beethoven<P>“The conductor has the advantage of not seeing the audience.” - Andre Kostelanetz<P>“You cannot imagine how it spoils one to have been a child prodigy.” – Franz Liszt<P>“The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.” – Claude Debussy<P>“God hath given to some men wisdom and understanding, and to others the art of playing the fiddle.” - Robert Southey<P>“Don't play it too fast or too slow - just half-fast.” – Louis Armstrong<P>“Beethoven had an ear for music” - Anonymous<P>"The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for adults." – Artur Schnabel<P>"The Opera is nothing but a public gathering place where we assemble on certain days without precisely knowing why." – Voltaire<P>“I write music as a sow piddles.” – Mozart<P>When the great Italian castrato Caffarelli retired, he built himself a lavish palazzo and, with his customary arrogance, on the front incribed: “Amphion Thebas, ego domum” (Amphion built Thebes, I built this). Below, a village wag carved derisively “Ille cum, tu sine” (He had them, you don’t). <p>[This message has been edited by shazna (edited May 26, 2001).]

And finally.... (I told you it was long!)<P><B>Opera Stories:</B><P>A certain comprimario at the Met was notorious for memory slips. On one occasion when he was cast as Shaunard, he had such a lapse at the end of Boheme. When, upon seeing Mimi “die”, he went over to tell Marcello. However, the hapless baritone could not remember the words, so he delivered the line in his best Italian accent, “Marcello... she’s-a dead.” <P><BR>At Teatro Regio in Parma: Gilda was interpreted by Lina Pagliughi, a singer whose weight was more than 230 pounds. When Gilda was stabbed and put in the sack, the poor baritone had to carry the sack to the river bank. But the sack was so heavy that the hunchbacked jester could hardly move it. From the famous loggione came the voice of an opera enthusiast speaking in the local dialect: “Mo fa ben do’ viaz!” (It’s better if you make two trips!). <P><BR>Animals in opera are often the cause of unintentional hilarity. A New York City Opera performance of Aida featured a pair of real howlers. In the beginning of Act 2, Amneris, surrounded by her slaves, prepares for the triumphal feast. As the female slaves sang their bit along with Amneris, a pair of Afghan hounds flanking Amneris howled along. At the end of the choral section following the dance, Amneris declaimed “Silenzio,” and the dogs immediately clammed up. <P><BR>The perennial Verdi favorite, La Traviata, got off to a rocky start. In the last act, the consumptive heroine is on her death bed. The opera’s premiere was a fiasco, in part because the soprano playing Violetta was quite hefty, and the death scene brought snickers and outright guffaws from the audience. <P><BR>Opera singers often enjoy little jokes on stage. Sometimes they are played in fun, other times they are used to harass another singer. There was a soprano who despised her leading man, a hairy-chested tenor. During their love duet, she appeared to be lightly stroking his chest. In reality, she was plucking his chest hairs. The tenor, of course, was not happy with this painful practice and decided to remedy the situation. The next performance, the soprano plucked at the hairs sticking out from the tenor’s costume... and was left standing on stage with a full wig in her hand. <P><BR>During a performance of Bohème, as Enrico Caruso took Nellie Melba’s hand under the table while singing “Che gelida manina... se la lasci riscaldar” (“What a cold little hand... let me warm it up”), he put a hot sausage in the diva’s hand. Startled, Melba jerked her hand away, flinging Caruso’s sausage across the stage!<P><BR>A touring production of La Boheme often played on improvised stage areas, and the company had a protective surface to lay over gym floors. At the end of the opera, Mimi dies, and when Rodolfo (the tenor) realizes she is dead, he runs to the bed and cries out her name. One evening, playing on the portable floor, the tenor ran to Mimi’s bedside, but when he tried to stop, his feet slid out from under him and he went right under the bed, wailing “Mimi, Mimi!”.<P><BR>In the days before contact lenses, a very nearsighted soprano was singing the title role in Tosca. For the second act, where she stabs Scarpia, the diva instructed the prop master to place a knife at a specific spot on the table so she could pick it up at the right moment to attack the baritone. Either the knife was not placed according to her instructions, or she forgot where it was supposed to be. At any rate, as the tension grew, and she needed to grab the knife, she could not find it, and in desperation grabbed the nearest long, narrow object on the table — a banana — and lunged at Scarpia, stabbing him with the fruit. After he died, she intoned “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma,” and threw the squashed banana down. <P><BR>Tosca’s leap from the parapet at the end of the opera makes for some harrowing moments. The soprano should really jump off the battlements and disappear from view. To create the illusion, there is usually a platform behind the parapet for the soprano to land on; sometimes a mat or mattress is used to make for a softer landing and to muffle the sound. During one production, the stage manager in a stroke of genius decided to put one of those little trampoline things under the parapet so the soprano could jump and land without hurting herself. The moment came, she jumped off the parapet, disappeared.... then reappeared as she bounced back up into full view. <P><BR>Another Tosca “jump” story: <P>Modern medicine’s most dramatic contribution to opera was surely that made in 1961 by a party of local medical students recruited to play the walk-on firing squad in the last act of Tosca at the San Francisco opera house.<P>The students, chosen for height rather than stage experience, knew nothing of the opera or its plot, and the producer had little time to brief them. He wasn’t worried because they didn’t have to sing. Five minutes before the start of the dress rehearsal, he told them: “You’re a firing squad. Just follow the officer. Slow march on in time to the music, line up, and when the officer lowers his sword, shoot.” <P>“And how do we get off?” <P>“Just wait on stage and, at the end, exit with the principals.” <P>The dress rehearsal ran out of time and never reached the final scene, so, on the first night, the San Francisco audience saw Tosca end in an unusual way. <P>When, at the tragic denouement, the firing squad marched slowly on, its members were momentarily confused by the fact that that there were both a man and a woman on stage. However, when Cavaradossi stepped bravely in front of them they decided he was the one they had to shoot. Yet as they lined up their sights they noticed he kept nodding in a conspiratorial way towards the woman. So, as the officer dropped his sword, they swung their rifles through 180 degrees and shot Tosca. They were clearly discomforted when she remained standing and they heard Cavaradossi, now directly behind them, hit the stage as he dropped. They gawped nervously as Tosca rushed to him as if he were still alive, and then screamed. And they began to grow panicky when they heard the shouts off-stage and saw Tosca mount the battlements.Then, as she flung herself off, they remembered their final instruction. As the curtain slowly descended, they rushed upstage and threw themselves after her.

Blimay! That should occupy a few rainy evenings. Thanks a lot shazna!

Those were wonderful! I'm going to send them to my musician friends. Still chuckling.

Thanks so much for that Shazna....gave me a lot of laughter on a cloudy afternoon.<P>One day when I was taking a piano lesson (I was still a beginner after 8 yrs.) and my teacher wanted me to hit the pedals on a certain note - she shouted "Plié" - it worked a charm...I hit the pedals right on time.

Shazna, your contributions sure brightened up my day. Thanks. I'm passing them along to the musicians in my family.