second fiddle

After learning of the severe state of disrepair that the musical instruments of Philadelphia’s public schools were facing, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Robert Blackson turned the challenge and tragedy for aspiring musicians exacerbated by cuts to funding of the arts into a creative opportunity.
First all the broken instruments were gathered and the curtailed range of the sounds that they could still produce (violins with missing or no strings or hopelessly mangled brasses) were sampled and a concert was scored—a cacophonous, haunting preview can be heard at the link up top—and through proceeds and patronage, all the instruments were adopted and rehabilitated. The attention that the broken orchestra drew also made it possible to install an instrument repair workshop in each school so they can keep their programmes going in the future and students might learn an additional trade as well.

drolleries or rabbit redux

The marginalia of medieval manuscripts often feature weird and wonderful and frankly impenetrable doodles of the faithful scribe, and via the fabulous Miss Cellania, we gain some insights in a common motif, that of bunnies doing violence to humans.
It does make one wonder why one would deface a text with idle graffiti that’s probably none too edifying in any context, but there was the viral convention of the drollery or the grotesque that represented an inversion of the expected order of things. A rabbit’s revenge was an obvious candidate as they were seen as characteristically weak, wilting but prolific—a compensatory measure that was an ill-advised tactic to adopt then and now. Perhaps there is something moralising and relevant after all in having bunnies marshaling the troops, jousting or roasting a hapless human.