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Harry Pepl * 1945  † 2005
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Die alte Mär und das Mann and other punning titles

Harry Pepl's wordplay

Harry Pepl wrote profound, often highly complex music and gave it mischievous titles. Hemingway's “The Old Man and the Sea” (in German “Der alte Mann und das Meer”) became “Die alte Mär und das Mann”, the salt shaker became “Salt and Pepl”, improvisation and variation merged into “Improvations”. Here are twenty of these titles with year, recording and explanation.

A trademark

The wordplay in Pepl's titles is no mere garnish; it is part of his profile. On Bavarian Radio (Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich, Germany) Roland Spiegel counted it among the things with which Pepl shaped his sound, alongside his musicality and his search for sounds beyond jazz convention: “with such lovely punning titles as ‘Schikaneder delight’ or ‘Die alte Mär und das Mann’”.1 The musicologist Stefan Heckel writes: “Harry Pepl loved playing with words and liked to refer to literary works. Many of his earlier piece titles were verbal twists.”2 In 1996 Pepl's son Georg Pepl described the appeal in the liner notes to the piano album “Flow”: “His playing with language is musical, listening to its rhythm, its double meanings. Romantic is the dialectic between profound music and an ironically playful title.”3

Twenty titles, in chronological order

  • “Salt and Pepl” (1976, on “Leave Me” by the ORF Big Band): The composer sprinkles himself in. “Salt and Pepper” becomes “Salt and Pepl”, a short big band piece with Pepl's guitar solo.
  • “Mahavischnigg” (1979, on “Austria Drei”): A freely improvised guitar solo which, according to Nikolaus Kohler, alludes “literarily, in Carinthian fashion” to John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra.4 Vishnu turns into “Vischnigg”, with the ending of many surnames from Carinthia, the southern Austrian province.
  • “Air, Love & Vitamins” (1982, ECM 1983): Air, love and something more, vitamins too. According to the old website the title was meant to express something fundamentally positive “with a pinch of self-irony”.5 Roland Spiegel picked up the image: “Harry Pepl's musical vitamins still invigorate the jazz world.”1 Pepl's best-known piece has its own page.
  • “Eye of the Groundhog” (1985 at the latest): “The title of the piece refers ironically to the Survivor hit ‘Eye of the Tiger’”, writes Kohler, adding that moles, “unlike a tiger, have very small eyes that are barely visible from outside”.6 So instead of the tiger a groundhog is watching; in German the piece was called “Das Auge des Maulwurfs” (The Eye of the Mole).
  • “More Far Out Than East” (1987, on “Cracked Mirrors”): For Heckel “another example of Pepl's wit in choosing his piece titles”, recalling Duke Ellington's “Far East Suite” and the standard “East of the Sun (West of the Moon)”; what exactly Pepl meant could not be established.7 “Far out” is also jazz slang for “way out”. The same piece is called “Ballentine for Valentine” on “Volver” and, at the AKM (the Austrian collecting society for composers, lyricists and music publishers), simply “Hundertfünfundzwanzig Zweihundertfünfzig” (One hundred and twenty-five, two hundred and fifty).8
  • “Die alte Mär und das Mann” (1987, on “Cracked Mirrors”): According to Heckel “an allusion to Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea”, in German “Der alte Mann und das Meer”.2 “Meer” (sea) becomes “Mär” (tale), man and sea swap places, and “der” Mann turns into a neuter “das” Mann. In 2023 Pepl's former student Peter Havlicek turned it into a Wienerlied (Viennese song) version for the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Austria.
  • “Schikaneder Delight” (1987, on “Cracked Mirrors”): Emanuel Schikaneder, theatre director in Vienna and librettist of Mozart's “The Magic Flute”, meets the English “delight”. According to the 1990 concert programme the piece was written “on the occasion of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus film”.9
  • “Tintenfisch Inki” (1987, on “Cracked Mirrors”): Named after the comic octopus Inki (“Tintenfisch” is German for octopus, literally “ink fish”).10 The name doubles the ink, since “Inki” contains the English “ink”. Here Pepl plays the piano himself, in a duo with Herbert Joos; it is his first released piano piece.
  • “Dinozzo” (around 1987, on “N.Y.C. IMPRESSURE”): A hidden dedication to the Argentine bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi, with whom Pepl toured in the Rava/Saluzzi Quintet. According to Kohler the title goes back to the nickname “Rhino” that producer Manfred Eicher gave Saluzzi in the studio: Dino and Rhino merge into “Dinozzo”, with a dinosaur echoing in it too.11
  • “Herbstzeitlose Arbeitslose” (1989, on “Schönberg Improvations”): For Heckel one of Pepl's “typically humorous puns”.12 The “Herbstzeitlose”, the autumn crocus, a late-flowering meadow plant, rhymes with “Arbeitslose”, the unemployed; both words end in “los”, without.
  • “Schönberg Improvations” (1989): According to Pepl, “Improvations” arose “from a cross between ‘improvisation’ and ‘variation’”, a portmanteau “that reads like a typo”. On the 2004 reissue it became, “tragicomically”, “Improvisations” and was thus “robbed of its double meaning”.2
  • “Einsicht ins Mich” (1989): According to Pepl's sons the title refers to the book “Einsicht ins Ich”, the German edition of “The Mind's I” by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.13 The “Ich” (I) becomes a “Mich” (me): the subject looks at itself.
  • “The Last Bars of Mankind” (1989): According to Heckel an allusion to Karl Kraus's “Die letzten Tage der Menschheit” (The Last Days of Mankind).13 Bars are also musical measures, so the last days become the last bars of mankind.
  • “Eastern Island Ears” (1989, on “Schönberg Improvations”): Easter Island is famous for its moai, the stone figures with long ears. Pepl turns it into an eastern island, and the title keeps exactly those long ears.14
  • “Pizzicat” (1990): A double bass concerto for Josef Pitzek, made of “Pitzek” and “cat”, because Pitzek looked to Pepl like a cat when playing. Heckel notes drily: “There is not a single pizzicato in this work!”15
  • “Natürlich Unartürlich” (1995, on “Consequence”): The opening piece of the piano album turns “unnatürlich” (unnatural) into “unartürlich”. It contains “Unart” (bad habit), and the handed-down spelling “unArtürlich” highlights “Art”, which in English is art.
  • “Draufer und drüber” (1996, on “Flow”): The idiom “drauf und drüber” (roughly “all over the place”) is given a comparative, as if there were a “draufer”. Heckel lists the title alongside “Drauf und Dran” and “Hurtig Gurtig”.12
  • “Frischwärts”, “Fugendichtung” and “Hurtig Gurtig” (1999, newly recorded on the double CD 2015): In 1999 Pepl burned a CD himself and labelled it by hand “Weihnachts-CD 1999, Vol.1” (Christmas CD); according to Heckel all ten pieces have “expressive, idiosyncratic names”.12 “Frischwärts” fuses “frisch” (fresh) and “vorwärts” (forward), “Fugendichtung” joins the musical fugue (“Fuge”) with poetry (“Dichtung”), and also means the sealing of a joint on a building site; “Hurtig Gurtig” (“hurtig” means quick) simply rhymes with itself.
  • “Scratchmo” (released 2020, on “Harry Pepl's Lonely Single Swinger Band (Volume One)”): Louis Armstrong's nickname “Satchmo” gets a scratch. At 9:17 minutes it is the longest piece on the album.
  • “Glennfiddich for my Wellensiddich”: The whisky brand Glenfiddich rhymes with “Wellensittich”, German for budgerigar. The piece is known only as a title registered with the AKM.

Explanations without a footnote are plausible readings by the editors; as far as is known, Pepl did not comment on these titles himself.

Where the wit comes from

The play on titles was already part of the stage act of the Jazzzwio with Werner Pirchner. The two often adapted the names of their pieces to the place: in Berlin, Germany, they opened in 1981 with “Berlin '81, die Erste” (Berlin '81, the first), and at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1982 they played “Wiener essen Frankfurter” and “Frankfurter essen Wiener”, a pun on the sausages and the people of both cities.16 Pepl called his one-man band in the home studio self-ironically, “bitterly ironically” in Heckel's words, “Harry Pepl's Lonely Single Swinger Band”, because the music was sad and lonely on the one hand and swung on the other, or did not.17

This belongs to an Austrian tradition. The Wiener Gruppe, the literary avant-garde of the 1950s around H. C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm and Konrad Bayer, treated language as material; Artmann's dialect poems “med ana schwoazzn dintn” (1958) turned dialect into an experiment.18 Ernst Jandl involved jazz musicians, among them Mathias Rüegg and the Vienna Art Orchestra.19 Otto M. Zykan, who played Pepl's “Das Auge des Maulwurfs” at the Wiener Konzerthaus, joined music, language and satire.20 Pirchner brought bitingly satirical humour into jazz; his “Halbes Doppelalbum” (Half Double Album, 1973) already caused a scandal.21 Within jazz itself the line runs from Charles Mingus's “Fables of Faubus” (1959) to Pepl. The seriousness of the music remains; the title opens a second level. Every piece can be found in the catalogue of works, and the studies by Heckel and Kohler are listed in the literature archive.

In Pepl's spirit: newer titles

Since 2015 Clemens Salesny, Martin Bayer and their fellow musicians have been bringing Pepl's original tracks from his home studio in Hernstein (Lower Austria, Austria) back into the studio and onto the stage, first on the double CD 2015, then with Harry Pepl (tape) & The (Lonely) Single Swinger Band on the album “Live” (2025). In the process, material by Pepl received new titles. They were given after his death, in the spirit of his wordplay and in agreement with Clemens Salesny and Martin Bayer.22 On “Live” they include:

  • “Fun Fare”: Fun hidden in a fanfare, for the shortest piece on the album, in which only Pepl plays, from tape.
  • “Schweinefunk”: “Schwein” (pig) meets funk, the musical style, and the word also contains “Rundfunk” (broadcasting); the English press text turns it into “Pig Radio”.
  • “Tritsch Tratsch”: Echoes the “Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka” by Johann Strauss II, itself a joke about gossip.
  • “Scat Snap”: Pepl's scat singing from tape, with an alliterating snap.
  • “Time Trace”: The trace in time, that is, the track on tape to which the band plays along decades later.
  • “Hernstein Blues”: A blues named after the place where the tracks were made, just as the Jazzzwio adapted titles to the place.
Notes and sources (22)
  1. Roland Spiegel, broadcast script “Was heute geschah” (What happened today), Bayerischer Rundfunk (undated, before 2020; archive of Daniel Pepl). ↩
  2. Heckel 2024, p. 106. ↩
  3. Georg Pepl, liner notes to “Flow” (1996), quoted in Kohler 2006, p. 133. ↩
  4. Kohler 2006, p. 44. ↩
  5. Former website harrypepl.com, page “Air, Love & Vitamins” (Daniel Pepl). ↩
  6. Kohler 2006, p. 98. ↩
  7. Heckel 2024, p. 96. ↩
  8. Heckel 2024, pp. 95 to 103; Kohler 2006, pp. 97 f. ↩
  9. Programme for the composer portrait at the Wiener Musikverein, 27 February 1990, p. 8. ↩
  10. Information from Daniel Pepl, 17 October 2026. ↩
  11. Kohler 2006, p. 102. ↩
  12. Heckel 2024, pp. 158 f. ↩
  13. Heckel 2024, p. 105. ↩
  14. Information from Daniel Pepl, 17 October 2026. ↩
  15. Heckel 2024, p. 216 (interview with Josef Pitzek). ↩
  16. Kohler 2006, p. 86. ↩
  17. Heckel 2024, pp. 85 and 154. ↩
  18. Wikipedia, “Wiener Gruppe”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_Gruppe, and “H. C. Artmann”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._C._Artmann (accessed 16 October 2026). ↩
  19. Wikipedia, “Ernst Jandl”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Jandl (accessed 16 October 2026). ↩
  20. Kohler 2006, p. 85; Wikipedia, “Otto M. Zykan”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_M._Zykan (accessed 16 October 2026). ↩
  21. Kohler 2006, p. 71; FALTER, 26 March 2014, https://www.falter.at/zeitung/20140326/erinnerungen-an-werner-pirchner-den-frank-zappa-aus-hall-in-tirol ↩
  22. Information from Daniel Pepl, 17 October 2026. ↩

Last updated: 17 Oct 2026