5 Brilliant Classical Works With Obscenities for Names

​Our day job is as a clerk in a sheet music store, and in general it is a pretty sweet gig. We like being around music students, teachers, and people who just want to play. It truly is an invigorating thing to see.

Then again... there are things in the store that are as awkward to sell as extra-small condoms. Some composers have names that may sound perfectly reasonable in their home country, but here are fine-worthy utterances. Others, involve outdated expressions, and a very poor choice of term for a woodwind.

The thing is, some of these pieces are necessary. Most of them are on the UIL contest list, or have otherwise been selected for state wide competitions. So we have to sell them, and there's always a lot of foot-shuffling when someone needs...

​Lillian Fuchs was a brilliant violist who was married to an equally brilliant violinist, and thus deserves some kind of award for not strangling him in his sleep if we can take our experiences watching how violinists treat violists as any kind of indicator. Her etudes are standard teaching repertoire, but that doesn't mean anything when some teenager with an overinflated sense of their own hilarity wanders in screaming "I need Fuchs Studies!"

​Weird thing? There are actually two composers whose names are synonyms for the big almighty American curse word. Johann Joseph Fux (pronounced "fooks" but seriously?), laid down rules that would inspire Haydn, who passed them onto Beethoven and Mozart. So without this one unfortunately named composer there would be some pretty big holes in the music world. You could say that the classical world wouldn't existence except for Fux sake.