Bodily Functions, Musically Spoken

[springrite]

I know there are lots of them, some more obvious than others.

The first that came to mind for me was the big sneeze in Harry Janos. Then, there is that.. uh... "what the hell was that?" in the Haydn Symphony #93. If you go by the Szell recording with Cleveland, it's clearly a fart.

Others?

[Opus106]

Symphonie Fantastique -- based on processes within the body or a part thereof induced by an external agent.

Oh, and there's that whole thread on orgasmic music.

[Gurn Blanston]

I know there are lots of them, some more obvious than others.

The first that came to mind for me was the big sneeze in Harry Janos. Then, there is that.. uh... "what the hell was that?" in the Haydn Symphony #93. If you go by the Szell recording with Cleveland, it's clearly a fart.

Others?

No doubt. Haydn living up to his rep; a bassoon fart right where there could have been something solemn. That's why I love Haydn.

[springrite]

No doubt. Haydn living up to his rep; a bassoon fart right where there could have been something solemn. That's why I love Haydn.

I remember hearing a timid recording of the Haydn 93 and the announcer said someone about that "burp". I commented to my GF in the car: "Talk about coming out of the wrong end!"

[Kontrapunctus]

There are some rather lurid trombone slides in a sex scene in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

[springrite]

As is my custom I prefer the original instruments and live performances.

You as performer, I'd assume? 

[springrite]

My wife considers me somewhat of a virtuoso.  But it is not her kind of music.

Married to a critic! 

[Mirror Image]

One the tone scenes in Stockhausen's Montag aus LICHT is the actual loud sound of the flushing of a toilet. It comes after a moment in the opera when a mass of people shout Heil! (short for Heil Hitler!). Quite hiliarous on first listening. And there are countless examples of him ulitizing a whole range of humorous honks, flatulent notes, sounds and effects (mainly from brass/wind players) in his compositions. Not to mention sputtering, gurgling, rushing, smacking, clicking, kissing, breathing, whistling etc. There always was a real true jester in Stockie's spirit.

Yeah, that sounds like something Stockhausen would put into a score. The only problem is he should be flushing this composition along with all the other junk he composed during his lifetime down the toliet along with it, but he's going to need a toliet with one of those high-powered flushes like you find in department store restrooms and restaurants.

[springrite]

Yeah, that sounds like something Stockhausen would put into a score. The only problem is he should be flushing this composition along with all the other junk he composed during his lifetime down the toliet along with it, but he's going to need a toliet with one of those high-powered flushes like you find in department store restrooms and restaurants.

You mean, in the words of Ross Perrol: "That huge sucking sound..."?

[Mirror Image]

You mean, in the words of Ross Perrol: "That huge sucking sound..."?

Yes...WWWHHHOOOSSSHHHH!!!!!

[listener]

There are some quite borborygmic sounds in Penderecki's The Devils of Loudon and an eructation (by the whale) in Tavener's The Whale

[Mirror Image]

If I'm not mistaken there's a bassoon fart like noise at the end of last movement of Nielsen's 6th.

[snyprrr]

At one point in Holliger's incredible String Quartet (1973), maybe it's the viola, produces a throaty squawk/quack that really does sound like an animal's cry. I can't imagine his wind quintet h to be any less a cacophony.

At one point in Xenakis's Eridanos, the string section as a whole does some very high pitched sawing that sounds like breathing. Then there are the 'whoot' whistles that he used in Terretekhtorh and Persephassa.

I'm sure I've heard that high whistling sound you get when a paper thin booger gets stuck in your nose at just the right angle!

I'm having some tympani rumbles right now!

[listener]

SCHULHOFF's Sonata Erotica for solo soprano is rather like a monodrama arrangement of Nichols-and-May's John and Marsha routine.

[springrite]

Mentions of Sonata Erotica suddenly reminds me of Takemitsu's Vocalism.

[listener]

Nicolas Slonimsky's Music Since 1900 on Penderecki's Die Teufel von Loudon....
..."to a libretto drawn from Aldous Huxley's novella dealing with the implosion of of the furor uterinus among 16th century Ursuline nuns in the southern French town of Loudon, whose latent sexuality was aroused to a feverish pitch by the virile presence of a macrophallic and multifutuent neighbor cleric whom they accused of invading their bodily orfices in the immund shape of a homuncular incubus, leading to a searching inquest by the Holy Inquisition and ultimately to his execution for communion with the devil on 18 August 1634, set to music with a maximal number of stylistic resources, from copulative heterophony of dissonant counterpoint in a plasma of pantechnical parameters to eschatological scatology in naturalistic onomatopoeia illustrated, e.g., by the sonic simulation of the expulsion of flatulent demons from the gastro-intestinal tract of the prioress in an icositetraphonic series of brobdingnagian borborygmuses."