Sometimes you run into a CD that gives you the same reaction you had on hearing the latest report from the U. S. Congress -- "Why in the name of all gods beneficent did they do that?"

The rationale for Nick Humez' Myth Songs, we're told, was to illustrate the stories of mythology for his college class -- mostly Greek, but including dips into Norse and Mesopotamian as well. The sources for these songs are certainly unassailable: Robert Graves, Homer, Vergil, H. R. Ellis Davidson, S. H. Hooke, Dante Alighieri, among others. And musical parody, which is really what this is, can be incisive, affectionate, biting, and any number of other things, including hysterically funny. Who can forget Anna Russell's brilliant rendering of Wagner's Ring, in which she took all the parts (pointing out, along the way, that Gutrune was the first woman Siegfried had ever met who wasn't his aunt)? Or Gerard Hoffnung's series of musical concerts in the late 1950s and early 60s that featured such hits as "Sugarplums" (Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture performed by an orchestra composed of recorders, tam-tams and popguns) or a "Leonore Overture" that has to be heard to be believed? In both cases, also, these are in the realm of those parodies that are funnier the more you know about the originals. (A slight detour, since we're speaking of college days: If you ever run across Robert Benchley's opera synopses, which included "Die Meistergenossenschaft" and "The Cafeteria Rusticana," grab them. They are also in the category of "The more you know, the funnier they are." A group of us theater students that also included several budding opera buffs used to hold round-robin readings and laugh ourselves sick.)

The songs in this collection themselves are fine -- not brilliant, but tuneful, in some cases catchy, and I can find no fault with the performances. Sometimes the pairing of subject and musical mode, as in "Akhnaten's Gavotte," is funny in itself, with its eighteenth-century musical form supporting the story of one of ancient Egypt's great, if failed, revolutionaries. Humez folds the story of Helen of Troy, the Wrath of Achilles, and the wanderings of Odysseus and Aeneas into a rendering that partakes equally of sea shanty and 1960s protest song. And somehow, the story of the House of Atreus -- Atreus, Agamemnon, Elektra and Orestes -- as a Scottish border ballad has a certain deliciously evil quality.

Maybe that's the problem -- everything about this collection is good, but not exceptional, and if you're going to do parody that's beyond a collegiate level, you have to be exceptional. I certainly have no objection to finding humor or relevance in myth -- I've read enough mythology and folktales to know that they are quite often earthy, ironic, even bawdy. Maybe that's another place where this collection misses: the stories as delivered here become fairly light-weight. The humor is a general tone rather than a pointer and more often than not undercuts the strength of the story, as it did not in the hands of a master like Russell, whose approach was both more incisive, weightier, and much funnier: her comment about Siegfried's aunts, who included his great love, Brunnhilde, only pointed up the outrageously incestuous goings-on of the Norse gods.

I really can't speak to the effectiveness of these songs as a teaching device, but, while there are some enjoyable tunes in this collection, there's nothing that really grabbed me. Ultimately, I just don't see the point, except as something for college students to sit around and laugh over some evening, and I honestly think there are funnier things to do it with.