How the First Orchestra Was Formed
International Music Season
Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 1994
In the years BC (Before Compact discs), and long before even the first minor tenor had sung, let alone three major ones all at once, there ed very little I the way of organised music-making. With the world in a state of nature, anything and everything capable of making a noise did so, constantly and incessantly. Sheer pandemonium in other words, and while there was plenty to be heard, there was precious little worth actually listening to – a bit like Prime Minister’s Question Time. Fossil evidence indicates there may have been a bivalve mollusc capable of performing the opening two bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, but its inability to make the crucial modulation into the third and fourth bars very quickly led to its extinction.
The time was therefore ripe for an individual of vision and energy to stamp his personality on the whole shooting match and cometh the hour, cometh the man. Described in the Wall Street Journal of the time as “Rich as Croesus, blind as a bat, and hard as a hockey puck”, Ur-Impresario strode forth onto the world stage, quelled the swelling bedlam with a single twitch of his little pointy white stick and, fixing the riotous multitudes with a baleful eye, made this utterance:
“So which of you bums wants to be a star?”
The uproar was immediate and deafening. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but it has always had as sharp an eye for the main chance as everybody else.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” went on this unlikely saviour of the world’s eardrums. “I may look to you like white trash from Hicksville, but if there’s one thing that gets me right here” (and he pudgily thumped the wallet where it rested over his heart) “it’s a sweet toon. So if any of youse can prove you’re worth the investment, I’ll see to it you get to perform the greatest music ever written in the plushest concert halls of the world.”
“What d’you mean, ‘see to it’?” shouted a cheeky young pup from the back. “We thought you were blind?”
“I ain’t blind, I’m just so rich I pay other people to do the seeing for me. No point having a dog and peeing on the carpet yourself, get me?” A gale of sycophantic laughter briefly blew his shiny coat-tails horizontally out behind him. “Save it for the auditions,” he advised them coldly. “You got one week to rehoice.”
Now, among the crowds who had gathered to hear this pronouncement there sat a little band of rejects. They had evolved slightly differently from everything else, each developing an individual oddity which had set them apart. There was Woodwind, a quiet and reflective river-reed whose appalling schoolboy acne had left him with a row of unsightly holes down his stem. There was Brass, a fat and shiny tube with a big mouth whose chain-smoking had wrecked his voice and turned his whole body yellow. There was Percussion, a sawn-off barrel-chested lummox whose years in the boxing ring had left him with skin like parchment and an I.Q. that actually started with a decimal point, and there was Strings, a vivacious but slightly faded jewel-case held together with twine. But their exile was all they had in common. Now they looked at one another with a mild surmise, and a typical argument broke out.
“Clearly I’m the best,” rasped Brass, “because I’m bold and bright and can make the loudest noise.”
“On your bike,” snapped back Strings, “I have the most plangent tone and the widest range, and what’s more, get a load of those curves.”
She struck a brief mannequin pose which as usual made Woodwind blush to the roots of his pustules. “What do you think, Percussion?” he asked, and Percussion said “Thud.”
“Come again?” said Strings.
“Bang crash wallop,” Percussion explained. “Bump tinkle clang.”
The other three sadly shook their heads.
“He has a point though.” Woodwind coughed delicately and his companions stared at him. “I mean it
would be pleasant, wouldn’t it, to be listened to with respect for a change.”
“Pleasant. Yes, that’s a good word,” said Strings with a sniff. “Out of the common ruck and away from the hoi polloi.”
“Too right,” Brass agreed. “I think I could stand a bit of plush myself. Being out I the weather all day, I’m getting tarnished.”
“Getting tarnished?” inquired Strings lightly of her silver clasp.
Brass glared, but Woodwind put in soothingly, “I agree with both of you. I can never control my wind out here, it can cause dreadful accidentals sometimes.”
“And I get gut-ache,” said Strings flatly.
“So that’s settled then,” said Brass.
“We’ll each develop our skills to the highest pitch we possible can,” suggested Woodwind, “so at the end of the week –”
“May the best woman win,” finished Strings.
“Rat-a-tat-tat,” agreed Percussion.
Next morning Brass set out bright and early, making for an arid spot he knew where the heat was particularly good for drying up the little puddles of spit that always formed in the middle of his twiddliest bits. On the way he encountered a Rock Python lounging in the sun as he lazily polished up a few scales. Brass sat listening with a tolerant smile until the Rock Python finally looked up.
“What are you grinning at?” he demanded irritably.
“Nothing much,” Brass told him cheerfully. “Since you obviously have no chance of winning, you’ve got nothing to teach me,” and he made to move on.
“Come here and say that,” said the Rock Python.
“Certainly,” said Brass, leaning down indulgently. “Since you obviously have no chance of whuuurp –”
At which point the Rock Python clamped his jaws around Brass’s nose and began to pull. And the more he pulled, in strict accordance with Kipling’s famous law of Just So, the longer Brass’s nose became until eventually, exhausted, the Rock Python let go and slithered away, saying over his shoulder (they’re there if you look), “Try getting a note out of that, you flash Herbert.”
Brass looked down with dismay at his two cruelly distended nostrils, now both three times as long as they had been. When he breathed in they practically disappeared back into his face, but when he breathed out they slid all the way down again with a wonderful glissando.
“This may be all very cool,” he thought, “but that big asp has made me drop my keys in the sand.” So he fashioned a new bunch for himself, along with a few extra valves and tappets for good measure, and discovered that by using them all at once, and keeping his nose sucked in, he could produce a whole range of notes that he never knew he had in him.
Well contented, he composed himself for sleep but when he woke next morning he found a passing mammoth had trampled him flat beneath its huge round foot. Although he rather liked the sonorous opportunities this new body shape afforded, Brass felt he couldn’t go back into civilised society looking like something a Frenchman might play, so he settled down to eat something to get back his figure.
Since renouncing the fags in order to help him get match-fit, Brass had rediscovered his appetite and now, distracted as he was by his new nose and the various new pistons and keys he was experimenting with, he started stuffing down roots by the handful. By the time he took stock, he realised his stomach had got away from him. It was huge, and his mouth too was five times wider than it had ever been before. In horror he quickly dropped the huge gourd he had been about to stuff down his gaping maw, thinking he had blown it in a big way, when suddenly, with an enormous belch, he produced from his depths a thundering rumbling parp that was so resonant, even he was impressed.
“So that’s what tubers sound like,” he mused, setting off homewards.
Strings had a quiet time of it. She had simply decided to allow free rein to her magpie instincts, stealing each and every bright idea she could. “Look good, sound great,” she muttered, busily Steradenting her bridge.
She turned her attention to first to her twine, having learnt from some grasses that by drawing a reed across it she could create all kinds of different modulations, and the tauter she made the string, the higher the note became. This charmed her so much that she experimented with more strings, finally concluding that four was the optimum number she required. (Six sounded too Spanish, and she disdainfully returned the seventh, a flimsy G-strong, to the place it had come from after she found it had a hair on it.) Overcoming every instinct she had grown up with, she also tentatively tried out different body sizes. She felt she could carry off the extra weight just so long as she grew taller in proportion, and interestingly, the bigger she made her body, the deeper the sounds she could produce. She thought she liked the mellow yellow cello sound best until she discovered that the earthy throbbing tones of her deepest bass range were so thrilling, she decided to double this size in order to enjoy them twice as much. But her greatest discovery came one evening when she happened to pluck absently at a whole row of stockings she had hanging up to stretch with weights in their toes. A shimmering glimmering arpeggio burst on her astonished ears, and not a sound-box or a jewel case in sight! “Pure genius,” sighed Strings to herself, and the stockings, gallantly accepting the compliment, gave her a bow.
When the week was up, all four gathered to recount their various adventures and show off their new-found skills. Woodwind told them he hadn’t moved all week, but sat quietly, studying yoga, and trying to think himself into ever more subtle and intriguing adaptations. As he’d lain in contemplation one night, some insects had bored further holes in his stem, front and back, some of which he was able to cover with little spring trapdoors made from his scabs. A fleck of tobacco from his pipe had got lodged in his throat, but this merely provided him with a pleasing vibrato. A passing bully had made great sport of yanking out his upper lip into a long curving tube, adding to his repertoire of tones a deep throbbing bass one (although it didn’t sound quite like that when he tried to pronounce it), and one night while lying down on his side he found that by concentrating really hard on the Seven Tenets of the Sri Tankhar by Vashta Guri he could suck wind in via his ear which made a beautifully soothing and melancholy note. So he had celebrated with a small flute of champagne.
“Never mind the flute, show us the bassoon one again,” said Strings, because she had found the sight of his grossly-distended upper lip vaguely exciting for some reason, but Woodwind demurred.
Poor old Percussion had been through the most, but they had to agree he had developed the widest range of them all. He had been kidnapped by a gang of villains for whom he had refused to take a dive the previous year, and first they snared him in a trap and used him to practise their tattoos on. Then they had scooped out his innards and hung them up to dry while they filled his body with water and stuck him on the fire to boil up like a kettle. Worst of all, they had stolen both his hats and beat them flat until they were as thin as paper and shiny as Brass, symbols of their complete disregard for other peoples’ property. That night, while the gang slept, Percussion made good his escape. He grabbed his hats, dropping them with a resounding clash, then unhooked the line his ribs were drying on. When he tapped the bones to make sure they were undamaged he found they made an interesting rattley-dattley sound which he thought he could use. By way of revenge he stole the villains’ nuts and stuffed them into his pockets where they clattered like dried peas in a pod as he lumbered heavily home.
Of course by the time he had managed to explain all this to them, the auditions were nearly over. In an interview later, the moving force behind it all described what the process of selection had been like.
“Some of the jokers that turned up, let me tell you. We had telephone answering machines that could do nothing but beep. Car alarms that never knew when to quit. Those little digital watches – they were terrific, just the two notes on the hour every hour. Crazy!” One of his favourites was a foghorn. “Terrific range. He could have penetrated the epidermis of a pachydoim. Only trouble was, he was could only perform when visibility was down to fifty yards. But I liked his spunk. Great bunch of kids out there.”
Which was the most exotic entrant?
“No question. The octopus that played its armpits in eight-part harmony. He’d have a great future if only he could learn to do it out of water. Two minutes under the spotlight and he’d shrivelled up like a bagpipe on a brazier.” He goes on to talk fondly about one act he only heard about. “Somebody told me they knew this great talent, albino of some kind, had a single white valve slap bang in the middle. Unihorn or something, they called her. Would have gone over great with the kids. But she never actually showed up, and I have to say I never really believed the story myself. But then that’s showbiz. It’s always been full of these mythical great white hopes. You just take what you can get and make it woik.”
Now with just a few minutes left before he had to go and divorce his latest wife, the great man addressed the four instruments.
“I only got time to listen to one of youse,” he said. “Which’ll it be?”
The quartet decided there was only one fair way to settle matters.
“What the heck,” said Strings, “let’s all perform together.”
“In front of everybody?” asked Woodwind, colouring.
“Yeah,” Brass agreed grudgingly, “why not? Make a concerted effort, I’ll still beat the pants off you.”
“Thump thumpetty-thump thump,” chimed in Percussion, “ting ting.”
“Only you sit at the back, big boy,” hissed Strings under her breath to him, “and only join I when we tell you to.”
And so they began and as they played, for the first time in the history of the world it was proved that out of chaos could come order, out of noise could come melody, out of discord, harmony.
“You win,” said the Impresario, wiping away a smile. “Sign here.”
And that is how the first orchestra was formed, and in years to come they were to go forth and multiply to fill all the concert halls of the world, becoming the greatest success story in the history of showbusiness.
As to which of the original four was the best, they still argue that point among themselves. And U-Impresario? Legend has it that he once tried to combine the best features of these original four in a single massive instrument – String’s threads, Brass’s keys (white and black), Percussion’s huge heavy body and Woodwind’s range of expression and tone – so that he himself could sit enthroned among the plush, playing to packed and appreciative houses, his own finest creation. But quite how he achieved this, and precisely what name he gave to the resulting beast, is quite a different story!
PS
I can’t remember now why this ended up so inordinately long, but it was the first piece I wrote for Proscenium before I actually started working for them. I think another contributor must have let them down and they asked me to help out, sort of play myself in. I assume this must have been for some kind of classical music festival.
My new editor hated it.
“I just don’t like Rudyard Kipling,” he explained, though I don’t think I would have come up with the Just So pastiche on my own – someone must have suggested that starting point to me.
“This is the best I can do,” I murmured, crushed.
“Well,” he replied comfortingly, “let’s hope not.”
Tough old game, theatre programmes.