Here's a send-up of well-meaning but inept amateur musicians in the tradition of Mozart's "A Musical Joke," but far more concise. The piece is an intentional mess, harmonically and rhythmically. The brass instruments lead off with a dissonant stumbling-down-the-stairs fanfare that the strings and saxophones try to turn into a ragtime dance before the march proper takes over. Within 20 seconds the whole thing begins to fall apart, the rhythm section periodically missing the beat and being all the more obvious about it because the melody instruments have gotten lost and stopped playing. Flutes pipe up with a fragment of a popular ditty, and after a moment of confusion the march melody starts up again, only to disintegrate again. Thus the piece progresses, with various instruments volunteering fragments of tunes like "London Bridge" and "My Old Kentucky Home," sections entering in the wrong key, the rhythm pulling out of sync, everything receding into quiet vamping until somebody figures out what to do next. At the halfway point, the march starts again from the top, with no greater success than the first time. Now Ives overlaps stray popular and patriotic melodies with even greater polytonal and polyrhythmic abandon, everything rising to chaos toward the end then suddenly stopping, except for one poor saxophone caught off guard in mid-phrase.

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