Allen Forte is a music theory whiz at Yale. Linking his name with the musical term "forte" makes it even funnier!

The Hopak is just hard to play. And to my mind, somewhat over-done.

The term "matrix" in music theory is related to modern music and the 12-tone scale. "The matrix is a concise representation of all 48 possible row permutations in a 12x12 grid." Click here for more than you want to know.

I think the point is, for nerds like us, it's funny to see all these dumb little factoids that drove us crazy in music theory class, cast in a mildly amusing light. It's been 22 years since I suffered through most of this, and had to Google to remember what some of them meant!