I recently saw online that you can once again purchase and play the original 1996 PC game Quake. While it wasn’t the first first-person-shooter, it was the first one that had a truly 3D world and allowed for multiplayer games. I wasted many hours playing this masterpiece with my college buddies (I regret nothing). What struck me about this 20-year anniversary sale was that the game was getting negative reviews. Well, the game is ancient as far as computers go, and the graphics looks abysmal compared to modern shooters. But still, the guts of the game hadn’t changed – so why the poor reception?

It was the music! The original game had a soundtrack by the metal band Nine Inch Nails. They scrapped this music in the currently sold version, probably because the band wanted a cut of the profits, and it would be hard to justify selling this ancient game for more than a few bucks – not enough to pay the piper. Quake was a good game, but they’re right, it’s a completely different experience without the death metal soundtrack. The same thinking applies to movies. If we were to remove the music from movies, they would feel empty. Try to imagine Star Wars without the heroic theme. Or Chariots of Fire without the iconic running music. Or Rocky without “Gonna Fly Now.” Now try to imagine them with different music …

Does it work conversely? Could the music stand alone without the film? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I suppose. I have to be honest and say I’ve never seen the movie On the Waterfront, but I know the Symphonic Suite from it that Bernstein wrote, and I feel like I can tell the flavor of the movie, based on the music alone.

The classicists (composers from 1750-1810) were all about form. Symphonies, sonatas, concertos, operas – there were specific forms associated with all of them, which audiences expected to hear. A typical symphony would start with a sonata-form movement, then a slow rondo or theme & variations, then a 3/4 dance in trio form, then a quick rondo.

But these 18th-century wig-wearing aristocrats weren’t so stuffy that they couldn’t occasionally break away from convention. When they did, the pieces were called Divertimenti – “amusements”. These were like a hybrid between a baroque dance suite and a classical symphony: a flexible, multi-movement suite of short pieces (like the baroque suite, often more than four movements – more than a symphony), using traditional classical forms (sonata, rondo, trio – not the binary forms of the baroque).

Confused? Put more simply, this is late 18th century party music – short, flexible pieces that could be cut short if dinner was about to be served, or repeated if the cooks failed to cook the main course on time. Often they were written for smaller ensembles which could fit into smaller spaces, and often used wind instruments, which were a little louder and could be heard indoors and outdoors. Today’s piece is just this – a divertimento for wind sextet (two oboes, two horns, two bassoons). Go ahead and play it while your food is cooking; Mozart wouldn’t mind.

Donkeys are universally goofy. Their iconic braying has inspired composers to set “hee haw” in a number of works. There’s the amorous braying in Mendelssohn‘s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream“. There’s some good mockery in Saint-Saen‘s “Carnival of the Animals“, where the composer draws a connection between these dumb beasts and “people with long ears” … IE, music critics. There’s a charming Christmas tale by Rutter, “Brother Heinrich’s Christmas” about a donkey who wants to sing in the choir, and ends up contributing a well-timed “hee haw” to cleverly complete the carol In Dulci Jubilo.

But by far the smartest musical Hee-Haw is American composer Ferde Grofé‘s Grand Canyon Suite, which has a whole movement based on this delightful “ass-motif“. This movement perfectly paints a bumpy donkey ride in the beautiful American western landscape.