Punspiration (or Puns as Portals)

Anyone who's been here before would know that I love mashups and wordplay, and if you've read closely enough, you'd know that I think of these two sports as two sides of a many-sided coin, connected by the idea of connection. (Counterpoint is another side of that coin.) For whatever reason, I've found myself creating two little mashups in the past week which were inspired by puns; you could even say these mashups have no reason to exist apart from the coincidence of some silly wordplay. Keep reading if you dare.

Just a couple of days ago, a Facebook friend wrote something about how young people in his children's choir don't know/respect the classics...specifically, the music of "The Backstreet Boys." The truth is, I only know one one song (only because of this) from this boy band's canon, but I nonetheless ended up making a silly joke about "knowing all the canons in the Bach Suite Boys' canon." Before long, I was thinking of which Bach suite might best host "I want it that way," and after I'd settled on the Allemande from the D Minor French Suite....



...the rest took shape pretty fast. (I believe that in square dancing, participants are sometimes asked to allemande this way and that, so I ran with this idea and imagined a caller just telling his dancers to allemande...that way.)



Only a few days before on the very same Facebook, I had written something about Pachelbel's Canon in D and weddings. A friend mentioned she'd heard once of a couple who requested the "Indie Canon" for their ceremony. It didn't take long for me to think of re-imagining Indie as Indy, and voilà, another bit of punned counterpoint:



So, I believe both of these little "pieces" are musically satisfying, but they would honestly be less so if they didn't have that silly pun logic holding them together. It's as if the pun becomes a portal through which we find two somethings are more connected in a way we'd never otherwise have imagined.

I have, of course, done this kind of thing before, most notably with varied ways of combining Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" with other springtime selections. (I guess these are barely puns since the word "spring" basically means the same thing in each context.) Anyway:

Stravinsky + Copland



Stravinsky + Vivaldi



Stravinsky + Beethoven



But that's not all! There's this play on the fact that pianists often refer to Rachmaninoff as "Rachy."



And finally, two realizations of a world in which Luigi Boccherini meets Mario's brother Luigi:




(Yes, I realize Luigi -> Luigi is also not a pure pun.)

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If you just can't get enough, here's an MMmusing Musical Pun Playlist, with a few bonus tracks.