flotsam and jetsam...and covfefe

One of the inevitable byproducts of my peculiar way of being on social media is that I end up with all sorts of multimedia fragments produced in response to this or that. Many of them find their way here to the blog (such as this Bach Suite Boys bit now featured on Classic FM), but some don't seem quite postworthy - unless, I introduce them this way in a post about the unpostworthy!

A couple of weeks back, when the Trump covfefe tweet was having its fifteen seconds, I kept seeing musicians link to a little "covfefe" aria that ends with the famous Rite of Spring chord - which was fine and cute. But, I couldn't help speculating that the ambiguity of Trump's neologism deserved a similarly ambiguous musical context, so I suggested that Wagner's Tristan chord would be more appropriate.

Even though the story had long since blown over, I couldn't resist the challenge and decided I'd transition to Wagner from the much more conventional and comic Rossini - specifically, the opening of Almaviva's aria "Ecco ridente in cielo." One could make a case that this tenor aria is much too elegant and lyrical for this character, but I couldn't come up with a good transition from Figaro or Don Basilio, buffo characters more in the spirit of Don Trump. And I think the raspy synth voice makes up for it. Plus, the one bar of Rossini I quote is quite pedestrian, so it's more like Don Trump begins by trying to be profound and quickly finds himself completely lost.

Anyway, what we have here is a two-bar micro-composition. It's fragmentary for sure, though I think it can also stand on its own as a Tweetstück. (A German piano piece is often titled "Klavierstück.")



There's not really an original note here as all I've done is segue from one work to another, though I still think I deserve a finder's fee for showing how nicely this transition works. A quick history of 19th century opera in two bars. Short as it is, a Trump opera should have at least one tweet aria, so I've included it in my quirky Il trumpatore playlist.

And since I promised both flotsam and jetsam, here is something even briefer, which is nothing like a complete composition. Just a little proof of concept. In a Facebook discussion that had sprouted off from my Bach Suite Boys example, it occurred to me that one of the discussants is a big non-fan of The Who and Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto. So, just for T.B., I proposed a "Barber O'Riley" mashup that would combine Baba O'Riley and...well, you know. Because it's easy to do and because it's fun to do, I offered up only four bars, and here they are:




If there's anything valuable about this kind of exercise, it's showing how easily gestures from very different genres can cross over and work together. Sometimes ten seconds of audio are worth a thousand words - or at least a few dozen.