"Commissioning A Symphony In C" by Cake

A non-musician might have no clue as to what this referring to, but the title combined with "Austrian nobleman" in the first vocal line, it is obvious that this song is referring to Haydn and the Esterhazy family though no names are mentioned. The lyrics are complimentary of Haydn's music but quite critical of the aristocracy. And the band does an effective job of drawing in a couple Hayden like aspects into their music, though I am by no means saying Cake is anywhere near the same class of composer as Haydn.

First off the song is in key of C, which relates to the title and is the key of many Haydn symphonies. The other aspect is the development of the instrumental melody (electronic keyboard and clean electric guitar). Unlike the vocal melody (and most pop vocal melodies) which stays static, the instrumental melody has a much more varied pitch range and focuses mostly on arpeggios.

The introduction to the song has the guitar chord to open and the first period just has vocal and bass. The second period has the introduction of the instrumental part which does a countermelody to the vocal, which focuses on arpeggios and stays on quarter notes. The third period features the instrumental part and does some eighth but doesn't stray from the arpeggios.

The preceding section of three periods repeats again, but with some differences. The first period has some guitar chords between the vocal line. The second period also changes with the instrumental melody being developed. The listener can tell that the overall contour of the material is the same, but the melody includes some sixteenth notes and scalar passages, though there are no non-chord tones. This gives this period much more interest than the first time. The third period is extended by two bars at the beginning with the introduction of background vocal which provides accompaniment for the same instrumental melody.

The next period consists of the traditional guitar solo and incorporates the arpeggiations of previous melodies with some different additions including one triplet pick up.

The section once again repeats. The first phrase is the same as the second. The second phrase puts the guitar solo from the instrumental break into the context of the vocal melody, which provides another aspect of development. The third period adds a second instrumental melody behind the original one with a different timbre that has not been heard before and incorporates arpeggios and neighbor tones, and the period is extended by four bars to give this new voice some more time to be heard.

The song ends with the original keyboard doing a terminative bit with arpeggios that go up a couple octaves that ritard into a sol-do that fades out.