I’ve always been a fan of giving things weird names. And while most composers of art-music tend to be fairly conservative when choosing titles for their compositions, a handful seem to delight in the bizarre. Some of my favourites:

  • Banana/Dump Truck by Steve Mackey
  • Eating Living Monkeys by David Lang
  • Cheap Imitation by John Cage
  • Leck mich im Arsch (Lick My Arse) by W.A. Mozart
  • Genuine Flabby Preludes by Erik Satie
  • Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear by Erik Satie
  • Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America by Frank Zappa
  • These Premises Are Alarmed by Thomas Adès
  • Dead Elvis by Michael Daugherty
  • For the Love of Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev
  • notjustmoreidlechatter by Paul Lansky
  • Feels So Baaad by Steven Mackey
  • John Somebody by Scott Johnson
  • Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for String Bass by Tom Johnson
  • The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer by La Monte Young

Full disclosure: I’m not only a fan of people who use weird titles, but I often use them myself.  Some of my oddly-titled compositions include:

…because, at the end of the day, what good is art if it doesn’t add at least a little bit of RANDOM into our everyday lives?

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