Carl Orff's Carmina Buranais often used by those seeking a dramatic soundtrack to their escapades – but it's not for losers, writes SHANE HEGARTY
IF YOU'RE going to announce your arrival into a boxing arena by blaring O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, then you'd want to make sure you have a performance to match it. The piece is heady, it is epic, it is loud – and it is totally overused. So when a fighter chooses it, it had better be because he really thinks it is the only way he can fully express, through, music, his intention to go out there and clobber his opponent.
If a boxer wanted a piece of music that said, "I don't know how this is going to go, but let's have a bash", then he would pick Flight of the Bumblebeeor something similar.
Bernard Dunne (pictured below) went for O Fortunaon Saturday night (cheekily followed by The Irish Rover). Within three rounds he had been beaten and you knew that while the crowd greeted the knock-out punch with silence, in Dunne's head it was less O Fortuna, and more like the sound of a piano crashing into the string section.
The next night O Fortunawas back in its weekly spot on X Factor, where its world-ending dynamism is both hype-building, and self-parodying. It's the biggest moment in television history, the music says, or at least it is for today.
How did O Fortunabecome one of the planet's most overused pieces of music? It's doubtful that Orff realised, when he adapted a 13th century Latin poem in 1935, that it would live on in everything from The Omento the run-out music for Doncaster Rovers.
There's even a Wikipedia entry called "Carl Orff's O Fortuna in popular culture" which, presumably, only scratches the surface of its use. Famously, it was used in the Old Spice surfing commercial, and has also featured in everything from The Simpsonsto Excalibur. It is used as satire (Conan O'Brien often used it when a picture of Dick Cheney came on the screen); as parody (there's an excellent Australian lager ad that mocks its use in "big ads"); and as straight-up grandiosity in hundreds of movies and TV shows.
And, of course, it is used by mid-table, lower-league sports teams across the planet just before they run out to face a crowd of 300 people and the likelihood of heavy defeat.
This might explain its popularity. It is clichéd but manages to survive because it suits a variety of needs in a way that few other pieces do.
You could hardly play Aram Khachaturian's Sabre Danceto accompany the sight of the murderous devil child Damien in The Omen. A soccer team wouldn't gain much respect if it ran out to the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
And what does the choir sing in O Fortuna? It is a gripe about changing fortunes; a complaint about "Fate – monstrous/and empty".
It includes the lines: “Since Fate/ strikes down the strong man/everyone weep with me!” So maybe, in retrospect, it wasn’t a bad choice by our fallen hero Bernard Dunne.
