An English Mock

One of my favorite forms of media has always been satire. It helps ease the anxiety that real news can bring, and most of the time, it’s genuinely funny. In music, composers like Percy Grainger and Leonard Bernstein often poked fun at the overly serious or pretentious traditions of their time. This piece isn’t meant to be a “modern musical satire,” but it is my way of joining that conversation and taking a few lighthearted jabs at similar ideas.

The I–V theme at the beginning actually came to me while listening to Samuel Hazo’s Perthshire Majesty, which has a sound that feels very… inherently British-regal. From there, I started sketching traditional English dance inspired melodies and began exaggerating them for fun. One section pokes fun at rapper sword dancing, while others take inspiration from Malcolm Arnold’s ability to musically capture the feeling of being a little too tipsy.

Right before the D.C., the music shifts to depict a ceilidh (pronounced KAY-lee (don’t ask me what happened to the E, I, and D)). A ceilidh is a type of Scottish social dance, and it’s the opposite of polished or performative. It’s messy, communal, full of laughter, and you don’t need to know what you’re doing. You just jump in. That moment in the piece is a kind of celebration of what really holds social power: the people themselves. It then ends with the D.C, reestablishing the dismal, royal landscape that originally surrounded.