Why The World Of Classical Music Is Secretly Insane

[Music] welcome to everything boring is awesome the show where information makes lame stuff into stuff that's cool as hell this week classical music a musical genre is so awesome it's awesome even if you don't like the songs because it's beautiful music written by nutjobs in between the times they wrote the stupidest music in the world that spawned generations of tuxedoed Hunger Games the more European ancestors you have the more likely it is one of them had sex with Franz Liszt or at least tried to because when Franz Liszt toured 19th century Europe he had women throwing themselves at him just by playing the piano literally throwing themselves physically attacking lists screaming as they tried to tear off a souvenir piece of his clothing or meal or hair it was full-on Beatle mania it's what Beatle mania 's name came from and Franz Liszt created Lisztomania by inventing rock stardom he even invented most of what rock stars do in concert making his entrance on stage and event playing while thrashing his hair and making John Mayer faces improvising solos in the middle of songs and being too cool to play while looking at sheet music he was so great a piano there was a legend about him that he had an extra finger also he had sex with a lot of groupies which was common in that business next time you hear classical music by any composer think of it as classic classic rock written by a hard thrashing babe nailing rebel because tons of those guys performed and lived like maniacs partly because their crowds were what we think of as rock audiences in the 1800s concert goers would cheer yell or boo in the middle of the classical music like a thousand psychotic Statler and Waldorf so the performers fought for their attention by rocking out Franz Liszt perfected that and he based his frontman style on violinist niccolò paganini the king of hair whipping Hendrix style shredding then there was the IRA's Axl Rose Ludwig van Beethoven a temperamental jerk who'd Bale mid concert if he didn't like the crowds vibe Richard Wagner was a proto David Bowie writing fantastical operas about sex love and death and occasionally attending them wearing women's clothing hector berlioz turned it up to 11 and did his IRA's version of stacking too many amplifiers on stage by assembling orchestras of over a thousand musicians Igor Stravinsky was like a talented Marilyn Manson his 1913 ballet the Rite of Spring was based on creepy human sacrifices it started a riot within 15 minutes of the first note of its Paris premiere a riot that was allegedly Stravinsky's goal classical music's true death metal King Alexander Scriabin held concerts with the explicit purpose of driving demons out of the audience and his life's final composition mysterium was written to be played for seven straight days and then bring about the apocalypse and when these rock stars weren't shredding apocalypse ago rioting they were boning weirdly boning violinist Antonio Vivaldi was known as the red priest for his double life as a clergyman and an alleged seducer of everyone impressionist composer Claude Evis a bed hopped so frequently he drove his scorned lovers to attempt suicide baroque Italian composer Alessandro Stradella had a string of affairs got in trouble for stealing somebody else's mistress and got stabbed to death over it by assassins sacred music master Carlo Jess Waldo violently murdered his first wife then he remarried then that second wife accused him of witchcraft based Affairs with two household servants even a relatively normal family man like Johann Sebastian Bach family like a maniac fathering twenty kids across two marriages and composers had rock star style eccentric demands too much like van Halen insisted on green M&Ms only French composer Eric sati only ate foods that were white also Arnold Schoenberg was convinced the number thirteen would kill him Anton Bruckner made a point of touching the skulls of corpses and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote hundreds of letters to his cousin that were long rhyming poop joke poems also he wrote even during her music because next fun fact many modern classical composers write music that's unconventional like David Koch who's spent decades teaching computers to make classical music or Philip Glass whose piece about Albert Einstein is a bunch of people counting numbers over and over again or John Cage whose piece 433 is straight-up silence but those guys aren't going weird because they don't think they can compete with classical greats like Mozart they're continuing the tradition of great classical composers writing a whole lot of nonsense whenever they can like baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti who let his cat walk across a keyboard kept track of what happened and turn that into a fugue in G minor musicians still perform another stupid cat joke of the past it's called do at the booth with ado agathi an unattributed 1800s piece where two opera singers pretend to be cats having an argument and Mozart was the king of bonkers tunes he improvised nonsense poop jokes into live performances he wrote one piece called a musical joke which had wrong notes written into it to make the musicians look like idiots not how jokes work buddy perhaps Mozart's finest work of stupidity was called lick my ass a ballad written for six singers who would be willing to sing something called lick my ass Mozart even wrote a sequel called lick my ass nice and clean because apparently the first one was a hit or they had an invented that parental advisory sticker for CDs that saved America I don't know man I can't get into his head I'm just some guy I'm not a perfect demigod of excellence which is the person you need to be to play the works of mr. lick my ass as a paid professional if you see an opera and I know opera is scary boring remember the title of the show this will pay off if you see an opera don't think of it as boring Italian song yelling think of it as the highest achievement of musical astronauts because every opera singer is an astronaut in terms of winning a spot doing one of Earth's most difficult jobs but while astronauts receive Universal respect as science heroes opera singers receive Universal presumption that they are that stereotypical fat lady a lady you did not question when we put her on screen even though she's borderline made-up in actuality women of all body types perform opera up is pretty inclusive and great and as far as the men go their range of physiques includes stacked ones like these hey my eyes are over here also the rest of me is here please look big league opera singers like Nathan Gunn maintain rigorous workout routines to keep their bodies in performing shape and often an appealing shape singers also eat and drink every day knowing that the human voice gets worse if you consume alcohol caffeine dairy salty food spicy foods citrus or bananas all of which dry out vocal cords or cause phlegm build-up and merely eating and training like an athlete won't be enough it takes rigorous daily singing practice to train your voice to fill a concert hall without a microphone and according to professional opera singers like the Metropolitan Opera is David Lee good luck getting anywhere in Opera without three degrees from top music conservatories professional representation a stack of Awards years of dues paying and a hell of a lot of luck and getting any of those steps right takes talent versatility financial backing and the ability to at least fake your way through four entire languages if not speak them fluently so don't get hung up on whether you like listening to opera appreciate its singers for their back stories as an athlete and a linguist and a Beyonce all rolled into one and give yourself that same astounded awe of any person you see performing classical music the non vocal way on an instrument click your way to this Lillian Marx article on cracked from 2011 it taught me that brass players push their bodies so hard they wreck them sometimes to the point of making their retinas bleed mid rehearsal also many string players train their entire lives to end up playing the equivalent of data entry many orchestras are carnivals of sexism and surveys fine professional musicians are about as satisfied with their work as our nation's flight attendants and prison guards are with theirs but because these dick waving nut jobs wrote some music that's wonderful inspiring art the world's classical musicians battle it out generation after generation for the right to play it and every instrument wielding professional in that Orchestra you're watching and don't feel as entertaining enough has an epic back story they poured their lives into to get to wear that bowtie that boring bowtie admittedly a composer tried to end the world [Music] hey guys please come out to UCB sunset to see the next live crack podcast it's going to be December 10th and we're going to be doing our year-in-review app we're calling it the Year in Review in review what does that mean I actually legitimately don't know yet but I'm going to figure it out before then and it's going to be awesome hope see you there

Channel: Cracked

Views: 738,749

Rating: 4.8665357 out of 5

Keywords: Classical Music, Mozart, Beethoven, Cracked, cracked.com, sketch, comedy, funny, spoof, humor, parody, satire, hilarious, infotainment, axel rose, david bowie, classical musicians, amadues, franz list, john mayer, conductors, red priest, rock stars

Id: DPMlj6szMGY

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/sisyphusmyths]

Nice to see Scriabin getting some love. His sonatas for solo piano are wonderful.

[u/Lunchable]

I'll take a break from my meal to say, this was awesome.