SATIRES :: Guenther Rabl

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

The first ‘musical instrument’ I made acquaintance with was a thing named ‘Melodica.’ (I don’t know who invented it and I also don’t want to know at all. May he rest in peace). – A wind instrument with keys, one tone per key. Mistrustful as one is at an age where one slowly realizes that the weather report is not always right, I immediately supposed that there are still other tones in the world. But how do I get to them?? – I made the following consideration: Because every key gives a tone, perhaps one can get an intermediate tone if two neighboring keys are pressed at the same time. The result was not satisfactory. Nonetheless, it was a sound that was significantly different from the two others; maybe it was the really the sought-after intermediate tone? – In order to verify this, I extended the arrangement of the attempts: I pressed a key and, at the same time, the next one, so that a third key lied between them. If the resulting sound should really be an intermediate tone, then it would have to sound similar to the tone of the key lying in-between – it’s clear. However, that wasn’t the case. The instrument therefore proved to be useless as far as melody was concerned. Such types of unsusceptible schemata set up by adults were not compatible with my feeling of freedom.
It is superfluous to mention that I naturally executed this attempt with the white and black keys separated, and that I found the fact that black and white keys do not really have different characteristics to be deceiving, just like bonbons in different colors that all taste the same. The only thing that could be certainly deduced from this attempt was this: If a key is pressed, an ugly sound is created; if two keys are pressed at the same time, an even uglier sound is created; and the more keys that are pressed at the same time, the uglier the sound will finally be. With this, the chapter of harmony was also covered and I could now seriously begin to study the laws of music unhindered.

© Günther Rabl 1993
translated by Brian Dorsey
This text is understood as a literary work of art.
Quoting in context with a reference to the source is allowed until otherwise revoked.