“Please send me something I can set to music, only don’t make it the history of the world, the Thirty Years’ War, the era of the popes, or the island of Australia,” wrote Fanny Hensel to her brother Felix Mendelssohn in 1834. “Instead, find me something really useful and solid.”

According to his official North Korean biography, Kim Jong Il initiated “an epochal change in the history of the modern opera” by introducing an offstage song called a pangchang—an innovation, claims the bio, “greater than the discovery of the heliocentric theory by Nicolaus Copernicus or the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.”

While manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon put his batting lineup in order for a July 2014 game using the field position numbers 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 in honor of the Tommy Tutone hit. The designated hitter served as the 0; the catcher (2) and second baseman (4) batted eighth and ninth. The Rays lost the game to the Detroit Tigers by a score of 1–8.

Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.