Description
The day the circus came to town and it all went dreadfully wrong.
One of my favourite composers is Serge Prokofiev (amongst 200 others), I love the way he would put in very unexpected cadences or key changes (minuet Classical Symphony), or, what sound like great thundering wrong notes (again cadences in Montague’s & Capulet’s from Romeo & Juliet/Troika) and also making tunes from unwanted intervals such as the augmented 4th.
Using Serge as my mentor and later in the piece Charles Ives for this comical, and showy band ditty I decided to throw caution to the wind when it came to regular intervals used in most music!
From the start where the first clown bursts into the ring with his pants on fire being chased by a marauding elephant it is chaos. After which, other acts enter the ring desperately trying to help but only adding to the mayhem!
The crashed act’s then clear while the elephant act comes on. At this point, we relax a little, and we then get to hear some of the “fine musicians” in the band who either are not paying attention to what act/page they are on or those who wish technically pose a little after too much time in the bar before the show? Just as we come to the end of the act, mayhem strikes again. Charles Ives mode.
Monkeys enter the ring being chased by lions, followed by bareback riders hanging on by the horse’s tails. The ring gradually fills up with acts all trying to help each other but making it worse. The trapeze act trying to rescue the soubrette from the barrel of the human canon as she has become stuck whilst hiding from a tiger!
The band becomes more frenetic many are playing music for different acts at the same time trying to play the right music for the right acts as they speed by. Eventually all acts leave the ring without warning, the band now in overdrive trying to catch up and finish up the evening’s disaster coming to a non-stop ending!
