Three Shaggy Dogs (2026)

The composer writes: I find myself unable to say exactly how I came up with the idea of writing songs whose lyrics are jokes – but once the idea installed itself in my head, I knew I had to act on it.

So I asked friends about their favourite jokes, and pored through dozens of websites devoted to humour, until I had a shortlist of suitable material. From this list, my Three Shaggy Dogs were created. (If an explanation is needed, a “shaggy dog story” is “a long joke with an intentionally silly or meaningless ending,” according to one dictionary.)

Similarly, I am unable to say who originally invented these three jokes. Like many jokes, they seem to have no verifiable authors – and, in any case, I extensively altered the texts when I set them to music. I can't say they are "my" jokes, but they are my telling of the jokes I selected.

And it’s no co-incidence that the instrumentation I chose for the colourful chamber ensemble accompanying the singer is identical to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, of 1912. With this seminal work, Schoenberg inspired many other pieces by a wide variety of composers, all with this particular formation.