Extremely good ideas

Bizarre they may seem, but music's most outlandish inventions and notions can also be just what is needed to unleash truly original thought

- MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN

It's music history, Jim, but not as we know it. Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman's Orchestra: The Greatest Curiosities From the History of Music (see p97) seems, on the face of it, to be a collection of the bizarre and the grotesque, in which badger theremins, trumpets with 13 bells and organs made from the bodies of pigs are lavishly illustrated, and in which you can see Elgar's unsolved musical riddles alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s diabolical instrumentarium in his Garden of Earthly Delights. There's even a picture and description of the German Schandflöte, the ‘shame flute’, a medieval torture device designed to put incompetent players who had offended the sensibilities of their listeners in an agony of infinite performance, with a metal brace around their necks, fingers fixed around the instrument.