There is nought else I feel like doing this evening, so I thought I’d write a brief post about a very brief song. The Side Show is a mere thirty-seconds long and is one of Charles Ives’s especially jokey pieces. Ives discovered that a popular comic song and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 share a common melodic theme and — being Ives — thought it would be good fun to mix them together. You may recall that the second movement of Symphony No. 6 is an unusual waltz-like piece is 5/4. Consulting my copy of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, I find two examples of contemporary criticism of the symphony, and the second movement in particular. ‘This disagreeable metre upsets both listener and player,’ wrote a Mr Eduard Hanslick. A particularly incensed Bostonian named W. F. Apthorp wrote that ‘the Pathetique Symphony threads all the foul ditches and sewers of human despair; it is unclean as music can well be.’ He then complains about the second movement, ‘with its strabismal rhythm’. Naturally, something with a strabismal rhythm (what a delightful term!) had a strong appeal for Ives. In imitation, The Side Show has a stuttering waltz-like rhythm that keeps tripping itself up in alternating bars of 3/4 and 2/4. Still, it sounds like a relatively normal song (for Ives at least) until bar 15, where the metre stays at 3/4 for four bars, which rather than stabilising the music has a dizzying effect, with the melodic line descending, ascending, descending, ascending, until wobbling nervously on the fourth bar (perhaps in reference to the ‘merry-go round’ in the text two bars earlier?) And then what should be ‘Look a bit like a [clown]’, becomes:

Look a bit like a
Russian Dance, Some speak of so highly
As they do of Riley!

(There’s the Tchaikovsky reference.)

You can listen and follow the score here: