Garrett Schumann posted on Twitter about Luigi Boccherini‘s String Quintet in E major, Op 11 No 5, one of the great one-hit wonders of the Western canon.
I didn’t recognize the title and composer, but the music itself was instantly familiar to me as a film score cliche signifying classiness. When I posted that observation, Christopher Hunter responded.
I knew the tune on the first note and never knew who it came from, it's the amen break of snobbery
— Christopher Hunter (@chunter16) February 21, 2020
That phrase is so precisely correct.
Here’s my favorite Boccherini String Quartet usage.
Lee Rosevere linked to The Idiot’s Guide To Classical Music, a compilation of just this kind of cliche. I love these kinds of lists. Where else could you find out the composer and title of the music from a commercial for fancy chocolate?
This one is iconic too, it’s been used in many episodes of SpongeBob:
And this one, which I probably first heard in Bugs Bunny:
It’s weird to think that something like this even has a composer, but of course it does:
Oh no, the factory is out of control! Modern life is too crazy!
Oh hey, my Nokia phone is ringing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQzUx3QW2Y
I know it’s terrible to treat the Western art canon as a library of film, TV and sound design cliches. But cliches are fun.
The Francisco Tárrega performance is stunningly beautiful, which makes it all the more jarring when my brain hears that Nokia hook.
I was struck by your comment about Boccherini’s Minuet being a one-hit-wonder. Kind of sad, really, because he was actually extremely prolific and a really great composer. He was an Italian musician hired as a court composer in Spain, which, during his lifetime at least, was like falling off the edge of the world into an abyss; no doubt this contributed to his anonymity. He really is worth exploring: his cello concerti and string quartets are pretty remarkable for the era.
So shocked that the Nokia ringtone is a real tune. I feel very smug that I may now be the only one among my musician friends that knows this (although I will be posting the YouTube clip to Facebook right after I hit send on this comment).