Spring Music Lessons for Holidays & Special Days: April Fool's Day Music Lesson

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SPRING Music Lessons for Holidays & Special Days is an online course that can help you use music to celebrate the special days throughout the months of March, April, and May each year. Learn about, listen to, and do activities with various songs and music which relate to spring holidays such as Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, and Mother’s Day. Also included are fun music lessons for special days such as April Fool’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, and Dr. Seuss Day! Enjoy the April Fool’s Day music lesson (with printable) for free!

SPRING Music Lessons for Holidays & Special Days

Each of the 11 lessons includes:

Information about the holiday or special day
Videos of the music to listen to/ watch
At least one printable
An online quiz

Note: Spring Music for Holidays & Special Days is aimed mostly toward Americans since many of the holidays and special days included are uniquely American. All lessons are taken from the full course Music for Holidays & Special Days. If you already own it, you don’t need this one.

Now, enjoy a lesson directly from the course for FREE!

Spring Music Lesson ~ April Fool’s Day Music Lesson:

April Fool’s Day is a day when people participate in pranks and play practical jokes on others. History.com says it was first popularized as a holiday in the year 1700.

Peter Schickele, also known as P.D.Q. Bach, is an American musician and composer born in 1935. . He has played practical jokes on the musical world by performing music he says he “discovered.” He loves satire and parody, and many of his pieces and performances are quite hilarious, especially if you know the “real” music quite well.

Wikipedia says this about him:

“The humor in P. D. Q. Bach music often derives from violation of audience expectations, such as repeating a tune more than the usual number of times, resolving a musical chord later than usual or not at all, unusual key changes, excessive dissonance, or sudden switches from high art to low art. Further humor is obtained by replacing parts of certain classical pieces with similar common songs, such as the opening of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 with “Beautiful Dreamer”, or rewriting Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as the 1712 Overture, with “Yankee Doodle” replacing Tchaikovsky’s melody, and “Pop Goes the Weasel” replacing “La Marseillaise”.“

Let’s listen to some funny performances by P.D.Q. Bach as we celebrate April Fool’s Day.

This version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 has “sports commentary” by Peter Schickele himself.