Sweet Tunes - FFM 2010

The only way to appease the creature was to play music at it – the older music the better. Whenever the music stopped, it'd stop its melodic swaying, freeze, and then let out the most terrifying and deadly cry. Eardrums bursting, glass shattering, electronics exploding, eyeballs melting – that kind of cry.

After that, it would disappear, only to reappear at the most inconvenient place imaginable, ready to explode again. If those around it valued their spleens, they would start digging for their MP3-players right away. The more musical amongst us might start  a serenade, or some kind of ad-libbed drumming session on whatever's nearby.

But the creature's appetites for quality only increased as the days passed and no-one had yet figured out a way to communicate, capture or otherwise kill the thing. The tinny sound of a radio would only calm it for so long, sometimes even making it angry enough to lash out a protuberance and destroy the offending equipment. Then it would scream, and all replacements would shatter. Things were looking bad.

The Volunteer Orchestral Corps, the VOC, was formed after the creature had somehow found its way into a music hall in the middle of a performance of Brahms. The terrified orchestra had continued playing even after the rest of the audience had made their speedy retreat, going through two symphonies and half a piano concerto before the creature, apparently satiated, disappeared. Shaking with exhaustion, the orchestra realized that, for the time being, their art was the one thing keeping the creature at bay.

Heckelphones, harpsichords and flugelhorns – clarinets, flutes and bassoons, cymbals, xylophones, and tambourines and very, very many violins were packed into newly commissioned VOC vans, helicopters and aeroplanes, in the most imaginative ways possible. The grey-haired tuba players and the young triangle-players sat side by side like soldiers going to war, surrounded by their instruments of choice, heading full speed towards the latest report of the creature's appearance.

It's quite amazing where you can fit an orchestra, when it is truly needed.

In the New York City sewers, in the middle of Quartettsatz in C minor (D.703) by Schubert, the scientists studying the creature finally made progress. Using an advanced, and highly mobile, spectroscopical scanner, a foreign object was discovered inside the creature's gelatinous form. In a journey going from the top of the South Tower of Notre Dame to the middle of the Saharan desert, the spectroscopic scan of the golden object was eventually concluded, in the middle of Stravinsky's The Firebird, played by a very sweaty Cairo Symphony Orchestra. The image of the object was complete.

"The Sounds of Earth" it said. And then: "United States of America." And then: "Planet Earth"

After many symphonies of deliberation, accord was found. A nigh-identical golden record was constructed with all haste. Upon it were registered the radio waves of Saturn; as many hours of the highest quality recording as humanly possible. And then, while squeezed in underneath the nuclear reactor core in Świerk-Otwock, Poland, the scientists inserted the disk into the creature in the middle of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491.

Soon thereafter, it disappeared forever, to the intense relief of the VOC members. Only months later was an anomalous blob on one of Hubble's images identified as possible being the creature – headed straight for Saturn's northern pole. The Earth was saved, but who knows for how long? In the meantime, VOC membership is open to all willing to learn: YOUR violin could save a life in the future!