And now, some ingenious classical music humour

A friend of mine linked to these wonderful clips on Facebook.

Don't try this at home:



And I'd heard a recording of this piece before and not really seen the point of it: you definitely need to see it as well as hear it. I'm surprised it doesn't get done more often - it's a hoot. Maybe folk see the name "Cathy Berberian" (who used to be renowned for singing difficult modern stuff), or take one look at the graphic notation, and run for the hills. Whereas in fact it shows rather nicely that something which on paper looks as weird as hell is actually both very ingenious and very funny.