Malcolm Arnold’s Musical Jokes

Whimsy and humor run through much of the music of Malcolm Arnold–not surprisingly since the English composer always enjoyed a good joke.

As a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Arnold got attention, if not approval, by stuffing fish down the organ pipes in the Great Hall.

Although his parents were respectable and religious, a sense of the outrageous seems to have run in the family. The composer’s elder sister Ruth was invited to leave the Slade School of Fine Art after she rode naked on a carnival float.

On one occasion Arnold, too, left school suddenly. In 1938, when he was 17, his studies at the academy became too intense and so he fled London with a beautiful student from the Royal College of Art. The couple went to Plymouth, where Arnold swore off music but eventually got a job as a trumpeter in a dance band. He was completely happy until he was discovered by private detectives hired by his embarrassed parents.

After he returned to the academy Arnold met flutist Richard Adeney, who had a similar sense of humor. The two arranged a concert at Town Hall for which Arnold wrote most of the music under various pseudonyms. One work, for example, was listed in the program as “Sonate poor flute, by A. Youngman”–the French word pour deliberately misspelled “p-o-o-r.”

Since the local newspaper had no music critic, Adeney took on a pen name and wrote a review of it himself in which he panned the concert and his own playing in particular. Friends who had been in the audience were so outraged that one of them thought Adeney should sue the newspaper.

The friendship of Malcolm Arnold and Richard Adeny, founded on a strong sense of humor, was built to last a lifetime.