Or voice. My violinna can produce a sound absolutely indistinguishable from a priceless Guarneri or an Anderson laminar electric. But it isn’t limited to sounding like a violin. It can also sound like an organ, an oboe, a trumpet or tuned vacuum breach sirens; its circuitry can synthesize the sound of literally anything.
And volume? Alone its body transducers are capable of nearly ninety decibels at zero distortion. Hooked to a Klipsh-Kleinmann Sonicaster like it was that night? It can produce notes capable of pulverizing a concrete wall.
Damn good thing, too.
The opening notes of the piece Maire had put in front of us were some of the most famous and recognizable ever written, but according to my stand what we were about to play had been written by C.E.A. Berry, with arrangement by H. Pei.
I had a fraction of a second to read this, and zero time to ponder it because the downcount ended and we launched into the composition. Launch is precisely the right word. What we touched off was an explosive blast of sound that literally blew the hundred or so lobbears closest to the stage clear off their feet.
Even when you know it, even when you expect it, the bombastic, brutally simple opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth can catch you by surprise and spike your pulse. When they’re plated with subsonics and blasted out at just a few decibels short of the Death By Sound level you have what can only be described as Weapons Grade Music.
Ta Da Da Dummmrnmmmtn! Ta Da Da Doooooomtntnmmf Rube’s cellotta thundered at earthquake intensity.
The lobbears on stage with us froze, feelers whipping straight up like antique car antennae. The front rows flattened by the first notes periscoped their eyestalks in our direction.
Rube bared his teeth and repeated the phrase, lower, louder. TA DA DA D UMMMMMMMM! TA DA DA DOOOOOOOOOM! Maire weighed in the next phrases, with what sounded like a twelve ton cast iron violin responding to her bow.
My turn. I flung myself into the blizzard of notes on my stand like my life depended on them, with only the vaguest idea what to expect. My vio-linna howled out in the shrieking voice of an electric guitar plugged directly into a multimegavolt power supply, and I finally recognized what I was playing even as a million-horse-power whirling chainsaw of music spun out and felled even more lobbears.
The three of us slammed into Roll Over Beethoven like a trio of Godzillas playing fusion-powered instruments and intent upon stomping the local Tokyo flat with sound. You must know the song, it’s been revived and redone hundreds of times in the century plus since the Immortal Mr. Berry wrote it. What we were performing was an arrangement based on the original, by way of the 1970s’ Electric Light Orchestra, the 2010s’ Brain Flug Scrapers, and the 2040s’ Hidekeo Pei. What Pei, founder of the Pop In The Eye movement, had done was distill and synthesize all the most stirringly electric parts of earlier arrangements, orchestrate them for a full Pop Polysymphony, and create a piece guaranteed to bring an audience to its feet or put them on their knees. The only reason I knew this much about it was thanks to Maire, who often while EJing showed us how a particular composition had changed over the decades or even centuries, adapting to new times, new instruments, new attitudes.
The lobbears who had hold of Dork dropped him. He clapped his hands over his ears and began to scream—not that he could be heard over us. The lobbears fell back and began to writhe ecstatically, their feelers whipping around and their pincers snapping in time.
None of us sang the lyrics, but we sawed at our instruments in such a frenzy it was a wonder our bows didn’t burst into flame. This wasn’t the sort of piece you could play sitting down. There are some solo parts (called breaks or riffs in this repertoire) where our instruments reverted to electronicized versions of their natural voices for mixed Berry/Beethoven figures. By the time they came around I was on my feet, twisting and turning, literally wrenching notes from my violinna and firing them at our audience. Maire clogged and pogoed and duck-walked, her face filled with exhilaration, her hands and fingers a blur. Rube whirled madly around the stage; at times it looked like he was wrestling his cellotta, at others having non-con-sensual sex with it.
We ended the song in full flatout overdrive, Rube recapitulating the original Beethoven with a bonecrush-ing bass cello voice that shook the ground, Maire with what sounded like an antimatter powered violin set to Destroy, and me with the sound of a shrieking guitar tuned so high that the crystal punchbowl exploded like it had been shotgunned.
The silence afterward was deafening. I know that’s an overused cliche, but it really was. The lobbears stood facing us and frozen like a single moment from a Maine fisherman’s worst boozy nightmare.
“Oh god what was that awful stuff?” Dork moaned, uncovering his ears.
“The third B,” Maire answered with a hundred kilowatt grin. “You know, Bach, Beethoven, and Berry.”
I smiled down at the huddled and miserable envoy. “It also seemed to be something of a crowd pleaser.” The lobbears had begun shaking their heads like they were working off the effects of a collective sonic lobotomy. “Now as to the plus points our performance just earned…”
Dork scowled and climbed shakily to his feet. “I hardly think that noise you just created constitutes a proper performance.”
“OK, fine,” I said brightly and turned toward Maire. “You still have the baton, of course, but this gentleman seems to have his heart set on the Vivaldi. Shall we begin where we left off?”
She bowed. “We aim to please. Natural mode please, gentlemen.” We keyed our instruments, and when she nodded picked up at the point where we’d been mobbed by furious lobbears. In a matter of seconds the crowd began growling and advancing on the stage.
“Stop!” Dork wailed. “Please!”
“Yes?” I asked. We ceased playing, but kept our bows poised like loaded weapons.
“You get points,” he hissed.
“The maximum number?”
He ground his teeth. “This is blackmail.”
“This is negotiation,” I chuckled, pulling our pointpad from my pocket and offering it to him. “If you would be so kind.” Rube cut a lovely mournful Shostakovich figure that brought the growling crowd a step or two closer.
Dork snatched the pad from my hand and did the deed.
“Thank you,” I said sweetly, taking the pad back and checking to make sure he hadn’t cheated. The day I trust an ambassador is the day I trade my violinna in on a kazoo. Back into my pocket it went, safe and sound.
Sometimes a moment comes along when you’re given the golden opportunity to do a favor that will inflict unbearable pain and suffering on someone who deserves it. One of those splendid moments had dropped into my lap, and couldn’t pass it up. “Since you’ve been so generous,” I said with heavy sarcasm, “we will be equally generous and play a few more pieces to whet these nice folks’ appetite for more.”
He stared at me aghast, a shudder of revulsion twitching his frame. “Why in the world would you want to do that?”
Life as an ETDS conscript musician means being at the beck and call of self-important knuckleheads like Dork. It was a wonderful feeling to have someone who once had power to make your life miserable at a total disadvantage. I couldn’t resist reaching out and rapping my knuckles on the top of his head, a personal liberty that made the blood drain from his face, leaving it the whey-white of processed Brie. Laughter came from around the stage. His staff were eating this up. It seemed we had improved their morale after all.