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.
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).
The Francisco Tárrega performance is stunningly beautiful, which makes it all the more jarring when my brain hears that Nokia hook.