A Picture from the Hey Diddle Diddle Picture book, 1882, drawn by Randolpth Caldecott

A hurdy-gurdy of musical madness

What could be funnier than a sow playing the bagpipes before eating her own piglets? asks Ruth Gorb

The Cat and the Fiddle by Jeremy Barlow. Bodleian Library. £9.99. order this book

HEY diddle diddle… The Cat and the Fiddle... The Cow Jumped Over the Moon...The little dog laughed to see such fun… Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And Jeremy Barlow, among thousands of others, laughed to see the distinguished horn-player, Denis Brain, playing the hose-pipe at the Royal Festival Hall.
Other delights of The Hoffnung Music Festival, first performed in 1956, three years before the unique musical genius, Gerard Hoffnung, died, included air-raid sirens, broken glass, and an ethereal overture by Malcolm Arnold featuring three vacuum cleaners and an electric floor polisher.
It was seeing the vacuum cleaners in action that was funny, says Barlow. And it was reading an interview with Hoffnung’s widow, Annetta Hoffnung, that set him thinking about the connection between music and humour. Hayden’s jokey Surprise Symphony did not make him laugh. But the vacuum cleaners, the very presence of instruments such as bagpipes and tubas, were funny in themselves.
All of which led him to the concept of musical cartoons.
He said: “It’s the visual gag that I became interested in – and that is something that has been going on for some 750 years.”
It was a subject that appealed, despite the jokes, to a serious musicologist and researcher. Jeremy Barlow’s career has spanned a vast area of the musical world. After studying music at Cambridge and at the Royal Academy, he played the flute professionally, had an early job with the Royal Shakespeare Company, composed music for the theatre, and was musical director at Sheffield when the Crucible theatre opened. He worked for the BBC as a music producer, and was music critic for Punch – he likes, he says, mixing playing, writing and directing.
His interest in music history – by which he means the history of “people’s” music rather than an academic interest – began in the 1980s when he formed his own early music group, The Broadside Band. It specialised in early street ballads and popular dance tunes (think Greensleeves and Over the Hill and Far Away).
The band made numerous CDs, travelled to music festivals round the country and to France, and made an award-winning recording of The Beggar’s Opera – with Bob Hoskins in a cameo role.
It was here that Jeremy Barlow’s interest in the visual aspect of music clicked in.
Hogarth had done a painting of a scene from The Beggars’ Opera. Jeremy Barlow started lecturing on Hogarth, was asked to write on the subject, and the result was the publication in 1990 of a book on Hogarth’s musical imagery called The Enraged Musician.
It was about this time that he saw the interview in his local paper (he lives in Kentish Town) with Annetta Hoffnung. He began to see Gerard Hoffnung’s peerless cartoons as part of a strong musical tradition. From the lewdness of marginalia in medieval manuscripts through the rustic roistering in in 16th-century drawings of Bruegel, from Hogarth’s butcher boys playing on marrow bones to Victorian Punch cartoons and children’s books to Ronald Searle’s schoolgirl playing excruciatingly on the violin (“well, actually, Miss Tonks, my soul IS in torment”) there has always been the truth that the immediate impact of a visual image is far funnier than the piece of music which sets out to be amusing – “you stop smiling after only a few bars.”
The idea intrigued Barlow more and more. He went to research the subject at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, found undreamed of riches, and to his delight was asked to publish a book on the subject by the Bodleian Library itself.
He spent eight years on the research and enjoyed every minute, constantly amazed at the material he was given access to. One collection of so-called “ephemera”, amassed by one John de Monins Johnson, included more than a million items.
What was he looking for? The ludicrous, the grotesque, the incongruous, mock instruments, animals – it was a mixture of humour, music and drawing that often had a strong element of cruelty and class consciousness, and you need to look no further for a modern equivalent, says Barlow, than Little Britain.
Ideas of the comic, however, have changed considerably over the centuries. The Victorian image of a sow playing the bagpipes before she fries and eats her piglets would not raise a laugh now, nor indeed the 17th- century drawing of a blind, one-legged fiddler: “Poverty, disability and old age were all considered fair game for mockery and satire at the time…” writes Barlow.
It comes as a relief to return to Gerard Hoffnung and his gentle music mockery, and as a shock to realise how the musical cartoon manifests itself in the 21st century.
An American cartoon shows a boy with headphones plugged into a tiny white box, looking at his father’s roomful of records, “Wow, Dad, you have almost as much music here as I have in my iPod.”