10 Best
18.06.2012, Words by Ruth Saxelby

Dogs doing lists #27: Classical Music Riots

  1. Dogs waving a conductor’s baton over a massive, writhing brawl unfurling at the first performance of The Rite of Spring, professing, “Art aspires to the condition of music, and music aspires to the condition of violence.”
  2. Dogs carefully stuffing a bent body into the bell of a tuba, explaining, “I have so much to say, but never the means to say it.”
  3. Dogs sneaking into the Metropolitan Opera past a throng rioting outside in protest of the necrophilia on display at the premiere performance of Salome, and retrieving the offending, severed head of John the Baptist to proclaim before an empty theater, “Please believe. There is no way for me to convince you that this is not one of their tricks. But I don’t care. I am me, and I don’t know who you are, but I love you.”
  4. Dogs firing a pair of revolvers into the audience, proclaiming, “When you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.”
  5. Dogs submerging Stravinsky’s rotting head into a vat of pickling brine, noting with disapproval, “The maestro was decomposing.”
  6. Dogs bursting into a screening of the Disney feature Fantasia to find the Lord of the Flies presiding with a monstrous, gaping death rictus over thrashing silhouettes devouring each other in a cannibalistic feeding frenzy.
  7. Dogs touching a match to the doors of a packed opera house, and declaring as the ensuing cacophony gives way to the tranquil sounds of crackling wood and dripping metal, “FOUR MINUTES, THIRTYTHREE SECONDS.”
  8. Dogs scowling in frustration as the restrained members of a modern audience smile placidly through the relentless distortion waves of a sound cannon.
  9. Dogs leading an orchestra in a musical expression of the Anti-Life Equation, and gasping as reality suddenly shunts off into a fractal spiral, wailing, “It wasn’t much, but it was ours.”
  10. Dogs brandishing the bleached femur destined to be the first weapon ever to be used on Earth as Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra swells in the background, and unleashing an orgy of destruction upon the skeleton from which it came before hurling the bone triumphantly into the sky and turning to the camera to snarl in a long-dead protolanguage, “WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY FUCKED FOREVER.”

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