Chatterbox extends thanks to the many readers who wrote in to identify the march that Chatterbox (mistakenly) identified as an answer to the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s roadside music-appreciation quiz (see “Classical Rubbernecking”). To review, the snippet of music was rendered thusly on an advertising banner hanging from a street lamp in the San Fernando Valley:
Tuddle
Tum
Tuddle
Tum
Tuddle
Tum, tum, tum
According to the LA Phil, it’s Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” a k a the theme music for The Lone Ranger. Which certainly works. But Chatterbox had in mind something more martial, and happily, several Slate readers were able to peer into Chatterbox’s brain and inform him that he was thinking of Johann Strauss Sr.’s “Radetzky March” (to hear it, click here).
Meanwhile, Slate reader Anthony D. Stone informs this column that the LA Phil’s rendering of “The Blue Danube” sounds a lot like the theme song to Mister Ed. Try it:
Da
Da, da, da,
Dum,
Da dum
Da dum
Chatterbox thinks it actually sounds more like the theme from Mister Ed than it does like “The Blue Danube.” Perhaps this would also be a good time to remind readers that most of Emily Dickinson’s poetry can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
–Timothy Noah
