Last night ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch introduced me to the reigning stupid earworm of 1926, George Olsen and His Music's "Horses." It is so silly and so catchy that after playing it several times to be sure of what I was hearing, I went looking for information on its composition. I didn't find any per se, although in the process I stumbled into the recently collected lost radio scripts of Jack Benny, but I did find a claim that the octave leap of the chorus originated with "Troika" from Tchaikovsky's The Seasons (1876). Not actually being able to call that piece to mind, I hunted it up on the internet and gave it a listen and wasn't hearing it—or the octave—until almost exactly the halfway mark, at which point, with all apologies to Tchaikovsky, I cracked up. It's not just the interval, it's an outright lift of the surrounding melody and modulations to the point where the original now sounds like a novelty quotation dropped into an otherwise unoffending character piece for solo piano. I am now convinced until I hear a better origin story that "Horses" was composed because either Byron Gay or Richard A. Whiting was himself earwormed by "Troika." Thanks, Pyotr.
spatch introduced me to the reigning stupid earworm of 1926, George Olsen and His Music's "Horses." It is so silly and so catchy that after playing it several times to be sure of what I was hearing, I went looking for information on its composition. I didn't find any per se, although in the process I stumbled into the recently collected lost radio scripts of Jack Benny, but I did find a claim that the octave leap of the chorus originated with "Troika" from Tchaikovsky's The Seasons (1876). Not actually being able to call that piece to mind, I hunted it up on the internet and gave it a listen and wasn't hearing it—or the octave—until almost exactly the halfway mark, at which point, with all apologies to Tchaikovsky, I cracked up. It's not just the interval, it's an outright lift of the surrounding melody and modulations to the point where the original now sounds like a novelty quotation dropped into an otherwise unoffending character piece for solo piano. I am now convinced until I hear a better origin story that "Horses" was composed because either Byron Gay or Richard A. Whiting was himself earwormed by "Troika." Thanks, Pyotr.
