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The Journal of Provincial Thought

1)  In June of 1914, Arthur Schlemmpe of Skimpole, N.J., listens to a police band play “The Poacher and Pheasant Overture” of Adolfus von Zippe (1886) and undergoes a vision of William Jennings Bryan, naked as Cupid,  mounted on a pink ostrich, ascending to a silver-plated Paradise.

2)  Madame Angelica Thruppe-Schleiswigg plays the autoclave in 1904 for a select company, commencing with B.V.D. Bach’s Ill-Tempered Klavikord, Bk. III Suite VI, “Preclude and Evade in 2B#.” The festive crowd leaves her mansion and goes to the new World’s Fair in St. Louis without a further thought for Madame T.-S.’s accomplishments.

3)  Folk legend Blind Benny Bunsen records on 7-string dulcimore for Black Star Grumpaphone Co., August 11, 1927, in Winkle, O., accompanied by Kid Pancreas (pitchpipe).  Titles are “Steam Cartel Stomp,” “Twenty-third Street and Avenue W Blues,” “I’se a Mockingbird” and “Don’t Let Your Raggy Trousers Down.”  The records fail to sell and are immediately converted into “pigeons” for skeet-shooting.

4)  On May 6, 1824, the evening before the premier performance of his Symphony No. 9, Ludwig van Beethoven suddenly realizes he is deaf as a fire hydrant and faints.  When he is revived by students and acolytes, he has no memory of either his fainting or his total deafness and goes ahead to conduct the new symphony, as innocent as an egg, an anvil or a new-born baby.

5)  On tour in Western Australia in 1911, the fabled mezzo Melly Nelda, meets a kangaroo on the trail, emits a single fff  G over high C before fainting away.  The kangaroo (an adult Big Grey) is traced the next year by marsupialogist Quincy Frootpye and found to be hearing-impaired in both ears and suffering from vertigo and Meniere’s Syndrome, thus demonstrating that “Music hath powers to shatter the marsupial ear.”

6)  In 1717, G.F. Handel, learning that Britain is about to be invaded by battalions of castrati from Italy determined to introduce all the wildly popular trans-gendered soprano parts of modern Italian operas by people like Bonancini, Piccanini and Uraninni, writes an opera in the bass clef only, called Basso Proferrdo, bassed on a legend about the powers of Morpheus.  The cast of seven ultra-manly men singing like steam engines in a coal mine is booed off the stage, and Handel has to holiday in Blackpool for a month to hide out.

7) Musicologist Oscar Wen in 1951 unearths a vast trove of musical MSS. in St.Vitus, Italy, all by hitherto-unknown late 17^th-century priest-composer Giovanni Spatuletta— concerti, sonatas, songs, oratorios, operas.  Wen studies them exhaustively and has them played over by the Orchestra Camera de Milano.  He then heaps the horde of yellowed papers in the courtyard of his rented villa and burns the lot, saying, “Every damn one sounds just like every other damn one!”

8) Fourteen-year-old trombone prodigy Brenda Leigh Fleishschlider, of Porquette, Arkansas, plays two solos with the Porquette Municipal Band in 1938.  They are Alphonse Wumpmueller’s “Trompandemonium” and “Alas, I Lost My Violet Nosegay,” by Luigi Spaetzle, and after the performance, Miss Fleishschlider swears never to touch the instrument again, a vow she keeps for the next 67 years, when she is finally tempted out of retirement by the director of Sunset Acres Retirement Home in nearby Toad Suck.  Upon attempting a trial piece, Ms. Fleishschlider finds she can only recall two positions, neither on the trombone.

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By Allegra von Troppo