Miss Piggy and Ozzy Osbourne, Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave, Beavis and Butthead with Cher - all sound like recipes for ungodly cacophonies, and unsurprisingly the results were enough to make you wish you had ears like a rugby player. Whatever possessed the ‘mainstream’ artists (Ozzy, Kylie, Beavis, Butthead) to select such partners for these crimes against music is beyond us, but they did and the results are truly awful. For a discussion of more mainstream collaborations, the Albums You Should Hear forum has some suggestions of things to listen out for.

How about four musicians in four helicopters playing from the same score? Sounds about as promising as the duets above, but the product is unexpectedly stunning. The work of Karlheinz Stockhausen (apparently inspired by a dream in which musicians could fly), the piece for string quartet in helicopters aims to mimic the flight of birds. Composed using a different colour for each instrument and where musicians jump from stave to stave like birds on wires. Stockhausen also intended the quartet’s music to merge with the sonic signature of the helicopters. This Sky Arts film (showing today at 5.10pm and tomorrow at 2.25pm) follows the intricate and delicate preparations for the inaugural performance of this ambitious work, including the enlisting of the Dutch navy and the many complex rehearsals.

Ending with the performance of the piece, the film documents the fulfilment of the dream, and fittingly is shot from a fifth helicopter. Whoever said helicopters and strings wouldn’t work?