Patter song

[2] The lyric of a patter song generally features tongue-twisting rhyming text, with alliterative words and other consonant or vowel sounds that are intended to be entertaining to listen to at rapid speed.

[5] The 16th-century French composer F. de Lys published a song "Secouhez moy" set in what the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls "a syllabic, patter-song manner".

[1] In the view of Grove, syllabic patter songs were among the components of the new comic idiom, developed in the early decades of the 18th century by composers including Pergolesi, Leo, Sarro, Hasse and Orlandini, and they became a basic part of the pre‐classical operatic style.

The best-known examples are:[3][8] The musical scholar Gervase Hughes points to the patter number "Bin Akademiker" in Peter Cornelius's The Barber of Bagdad (1858) as a prototype of the later Gilbert and Sullivan model.

George Bernard Shaw, in his capacity as a music critic, praised "the time-honored lilt which Sir Arthur Sullivan, following the example of Mozart and Rossini, chose for the lists of accomplishments of the Major-General in The Pirates or the Colonel in Patience.

Later examples include "Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)" in Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, "Getting Married Today" in Stephen Sondheim's Company[4] and "Ya Got Trouble" in Meredith Willson's The Music Man.