Eine Kleine Kazoo Musik

The two hundred years since Wolfgang Mozart died have not been kind to the Mozart family. The Mozart family tree seems to have grown in some strange directions, suffering from leaf blight, and producing a nut who is now one of America's least respected composers, Wolfbane Armadillo Mozart. Actually, calling him a composer is like calling a pencil a super computer, but we don't wish to be nasty.

Born in Weasel Nose, Wisconsin, in 1948, the youngest bearer of the Mozart name is the son of Sid and Nancy Mozart. His father, a freelance sponge repairman, moved the family often, but young Wolfbane kept finding them. His mother brought the only music to the household, gargling songs as she fed the growing child. When she quit feeding him, all music disappeared from the household, but since Wolfbane was 14 at the time, he was able to find music elsewhere.

Actually, his real name was Bob Mozart, but when he learned that he had a distant relative who had been a famous composer, he thought he would steal his ancestor's name and try to profit from it. Unfortunately for him, though, he only heard "Wolfgang Amadeus" once, and he got it wrong. This was the beginning of a long pattern of getting things wrong.

Unable to make a go of it in his father's sponge repair business, Wolfbane tried his hand at worm farming, pogo stick racing and selling used paint door to door. When all else failed, he decided to lean on his ancestor and become a famous composer. The only problem was that he neither read music nor played a musical instrument. This did not slow our hero down much, though. He learned that there was a great musical tradition that might help him succeed: stealing music from other people.

In Bach's time, composers borrowed each others melodies with great regularity and used them to create new music. This has continued over the ages until today many film composers and rock stars write the same song over and over again, giving them new names and lyrics. But Wolfbane had to take this to great extremes as he had no original thoughts at all. He was forced to steal practically every note in his music, often cutting from the scores of other composers and pasting them together with chewing gum.

Even though Wolfbane is still alive, very little of his music survives, mainly because it is often destroyed by the musicians who play soon after the first performance. Some works never survived their first rehearsal. One piece was so bad that the players stopped playing after only a few measures, gathered up the music and burned it along with Wolfbane's baton in the closest metal container they could find: the bell of the orchestra's tuba.

"Eine Kleine KazooMusik" is one of the few works that remains intact, and it has even received a few performances. It is a curious concoction known as a quodlibet, an old musical form that was perfect for Wolfbane as it is supposed to be an odd combination of familiar tunes assembled in a seemingly random order. And since Wolfbane stole liberally from his ancestor's famous "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" for this work, it was a work that could be played by orchestras in their Mozart festivals. Sadly, those who bought it did so without knowing which Mozart had written it.

The other thing that set this work apart was its unusual selection of the kazoo as the featured instrument. Since Wolfbane was unable to play any traditional instrument well enough to write for it, he set out on a search for an instrument that he could master. He failed at the spoons, the musical saw and even at the beanbopper, a rare instrument that is played by hitting ones self on the head with a glob of plastic. After months of intensive training, though, Wolfbane was able to play the kazoo. (Of course, it took him over a month to figure out which end of the kazoo to put his mouth on.) Thus was born the greatest triumph for Wolfbane Armadillo Mozart, a work that is certain to go down in music history as one of the, uh, er, um, most interesting things ever written for kazoo and orchestra.