Musical Spoofing

I've got a mishmash of interesting notes about musicians who have played around with this sort of thing.

Fritz Kreisler
Fritz Kreisler, a fine violinist, had a hard time finding an appreciative audience for his own compositions, so he started writing them in the style of famous composers and passing them off as obscure or recently-uncovered works of the great masters.

How hard it seems for people to forgive Milli Vanilli. As if anyone who tapped their toes to the catchy tunes or rocked out at one of their concerts was doing so out of enthusiasm for the artistic integrity of the musicians.

The BBC broadcast what it claimed to be the avant-garde composition of a Polish visionary but what was in fact the work of BBC employees making random noise. "We dragged together all the instruments we could find and went around the studio banging them." The composition, Mobile for Tape and Percussion by Piotr Zak was a twelve-minute cacophony that merited serious reviews in the Daily Telegraph and the London Times before the hoax was revealed.

The "artists of appropriation" known as NegativLand have become audio outlaws for flying in the face of copyright laws in their relentless parody.

Milli Vanilli
The punk rock anarchists known as Crass pulled a few pranks in their day. They arranged to include a flexidisk of a song called "Our Wedding" in the teeenybopper magazine Loving. Nobody at the magazine had gotten around to actually listening to the song first, though, and they had to apologize later for including this "sneering attack on love and marriage" with a title "too obscene to print" in their magazine. Check out our News Trolls section for info about another Crass hack.

Gotta put in a plug at this point for The Free Radio Network, a good source of information for pirate radio broadcasters and fans. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to get on the air. The station in my town has been on the air for years now, and a town down the road has a pirate station that has become such an institution that it has arranged with the city to broadcast the city council meetings. Other pirate radio resources can be found on-line at The Pirate Radio Network and The Anime Music Network.

Some hoaxes in the same spirit as these can be found at our Art Forgery and Literary Forgery pages.