Thinking Outside “The Bachs”: Musical Instruments

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Charles II slept through the sermon, but woke for Westminster’s great pipes.”—The Wordspinner

“I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cow bells.”—Christopher Walken

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—11/14/11—In the sixth grade, I took violin from the band director at a public school in Falls Church, Virginia. If only I’d appreciated what a rich opportunity I’d been given, but I blew it off like Satan being offered a chance at redemption.

Mozart and Beethoven meant nothing to me, so I faked it for the entire year. Knowing I’d never have to solo for the teacher, I played “air violin” in the school orchestra rather than contribute to the “noise” around me. I just had to be sure to sit behind this girl who took music as seriously as I took baseball. I plagiarized her bowing, forged the fingering, and no one, including my proud parents, was any the wiser.

Six years later, as a high school senior, I fell in love with the tropical music of Xavier Cugat and Martin Denny, especially the bongos in the rhythm sections. One day, I took some of the money I’d made delivering newspapers and biked into town to a pawn shop I’d seen ads for in the paper. I bought a cheap set of bongos, pulled up a chair, crossed my legs, and began drumming. However, with Jackson Pollock’s ear for music, I wore my fingers raw, making minimal progress at best.

The two paragraphs above constitute my confession that I have no performance expertise, but ignorance has never stopped a writer. Since I have taught some music history in Humanities courses, I know a modest amount about the development of musical instrumentation, and I have some rather strong opinions, both borrowed and original. The time has come to air the grievances.

I’ll start with a handful of sound-producing implements I have never heard, but whose strident names (unlike the didgeridoo and fiddle-de-doo) are not promising.

These include the rackett, the aquaggaswack, and the clackamore.

Moreover, I have no desire to download Chopin played on an “Excedrin thumb piano,” but I admire the maker’s honesty.

Though women claim size does not matter, the three-and-a-half-acre stalacpipe organ and the nanoguitar are ludicrous, judged solely on their bulk or lack thereof. Call me biased.

Then there’s the German Überorgan, which produces impotence in those who make the mistake of thinking about it. Finally,I exclude the cheese drum, the beer-bottle organ, and the cigar-box guitar from my band or orchestra because they stink of the garbage from which they were salvaged.

Moving to the more standard instruments, Sir Malcolm Beecham thought the harpsichord sounded like “two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.”

• The British radio personality, Irene Thomas, claimed the cello has “a lugubrious sound like someone reading a will.”

• Anonymous thought the harp looks like a piano that’s been hung up to drain after the hunt, and doesn’t sound much better.

• Anonymous also thought the viola’s range is about 35 yards if one has a good arm.

• The oboe is “an ill wind that no one blows any good.”

• The bassoon is “a clarinet with strep.” I would only add that it surely must be a major cause of apoplexy in the performers.

• And the double bass usually “sounds best in the trunk of a taxi.” The latter opinion was expressed by a friend who had tired of wrestling his bass onto Gotham’s buses and subways.

At Carnegie Hall, in 1924, George Antheil cornered the market on rude and raucous “instruments” in a work called Ballet mécanique. Think of a coleslaw grater on your knuckles, and you’ll get the idea.

Taking the lead from Mahler, who’d used cow bells in his sixth symphony, and Tchaikovsky, who’d called for cannon in the 1812 Overture, Antheil scored his work for player pianos, automobile horns, an airplane engine, a tam-tam, a set of electric bells, and a siren.

Remarkably, not a single human shared the stage with these appliances during the performance. Soon, the auditorium began to clear, led by a gentleman who’d tied a white handkerchief to the tip of his umbrella. I understand that he and his followers were directed into a POW compound in the lobby until the robots concluded their hammering. Had I been in attendance that evening, I would have followed that flag in search of a tune that did not draw blood to the porches of my ears, carrying a sign reading, “Give me melody, or give me death.”

My grandmother used to love “The Lawrence Welk Show,” and I was often required to watch along with her to “improve” myself at a time in my life when there was no improving on Elvis and Fats Domino. Listening to Myron Floren and his pleated box, I came to hate the accordion and concertina on those nights of enforced culture.

Gary Larson captured the way I felt in one of his cartoons: “Welcome to hell,” says Satan to some new recruits, “here’s your accordion.” Satan might have added, “And here’s the music to ‘Lady of Spain.’”

Then one night, years later, I was watching “Austin City Limits,” when Clifton Chenier and his Red Hots appeared playing “Bon Ton Roulet.” Thanks to this “swamp pop” zydeco band, in less than an hour, I had forgiven the squeeze box for all the suffering it had wrought.

I had a similar conversion experience with the skirl of the bagpipes.

In college, my friends and I shared jokes about the Geneva Convention banning the doodlesack and mistaking the instrument for haggis. Playing the instrument, someone quipped, was akin to “throttling an ostrich.”

Then, watching the funeral service for the firemen killed on 9-11-01, I understood what Ervin Lewis meant: “Blood should be stirred before it is spilled, and nothing does it better than bagpipes.”

Since I grew up in a family that revered “the Bourgeois Trinity” of Mantovani, Percy Faith, and Lawrence Welk, it should come as no surprise that I never heard bluegrass until I was in college. The banjo was another one of those instruments I had learned to hate by never listening to it.

Then I heard Earl “Mephisto” Scruggs playing in “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and I understood the mojo that bluegrass performers invoke by gluing rattlesnake rattles in the pungent hollows of their instruments.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed life was a mistake without music, apparently never heard the“jumping flea,” better known as the ukulele. The instrument, in my unstable opinion, makes death by fleas appealing but, then, I’ve never been to Hawaii either. Stay tuned; I may get there yet and change my mind.