A NEW RESEARCH MENTOR

THERE ARE THOSE WHO ADVISE THAT I’m beyond the age of adopting a mentor, but Edward Brooke-Hitching is certainly in the running. This, I note, arose from Susannah Clapp’s “Not Quite Music,” London Review of Books, December 25, 2025. 

She reviews Brooke-Huitching’s latest work, The Madman’s Orchestra. To put this book in perspective, be aware that Brooke-Hitchin has already written The Madman’s Library, The Madman’s Gallery, The Phantom Atlas, The Sky Atlas, and The Devil’s Atlas, as well as Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports and not to be forgotten Love: A Curious History in 50 Objects. 

It just goes to show, as Wikipedia suggests, the intellectual penchants of “the son of a rare book collector and antiquarian dealer.”

The Madman’s Orchestra: The Greatest Curiosities from the History of Music, by Edward Brooke-Hitching, Chronicle Books, April 2026.

Here are tidbits gleaned from Susannah Clapp’s review of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s book.

Composer Piotr Zak. Clapp describes, “An early contributor to the London Review of Books wins a golden place among ‘Musical Hoaxes’. Hans Keller, who died in 1985, wrote with needling acumen on Stravinsky’s correspondence and ‘the paradisal aspects of the 1982 World Cup’…. In 1961, he set out to test what he considered critical indulgence towards the avant-garde. He invented a composer, Piotr Zak, ‘who is of Polish extraction but lives in Germany’, and transmitted one of Zak’s pieces.” 

Clapp relates, “In fact, ‘Mobile for Tape and Percussion’ was created by Keller and a colleague walking around a studio striking a collection of musical instruments at random (though I wonder whether the psychoanalytically inclined Keller fully believed in the random).”

“As a wheeze it was a mixed success,” Clapp writes. “Yet no one identified it as a hoax.”

The Most Sarcastic Piece in the History of Music. Clapp recounts, “In 1948, Rued Langgaard, enraged by what he considered the inflated reputation of his compatriot Carl Nielsen, composed a piece for choir and orchestra in which the choir were obliged to repeat—preferably ‘for all eternity’—‘Carl Nielsen, vor store komponist.’ ” Google Translate renders this repeated phrase as “our great composer.” 

Ha. What about “vores kære leder.” “친애하는지도자,” “our dear leader.” 

The Chortle Factor. Clapp continues, “The Madman’s Orchestra does not altogether avoid the chortle factor, what with the leek violin, the hog harmonium (or piganino) and the ice didgeridoo. In 1993, Paul Lyons was issued a patent for his ‘force-sensitive, sound-playing condom’, though he elegantly said he wouldn’t ‘want to go around telling everyone I’ve succeeded in this area’. Brooke-Hitching siphons off facetiousness by putting the condom description in a caption. The diagrams for Lyons’s instrument look like a polytunnel and a mousetrap.”

An Art Book. Both Clapp and IndieBound (“This incredible collection will strike a chord with fans of beautiful books and bizarre history…”) admire The Madman’s Orchestra as an art book.

Boito’s Mefistofele 1881 production, with set design by Carlo Ferrario. Image via London Review of Books.

Clapp observes, “A tiny but crystal-clear reproduction of Carlo Ferrario’s vaulting set designs for the 1881 production of Arrigo Boito’s opera Mefistofele shows a spindly figure in a cavern of clouds.… The only omission is a picture of the creature that in 1650 Kircher announced sang in perfect hexachords: the American sloth.”

An LRB Letter, January 22, 2026: Mark Mildred writes, “The sense of smell is ‘barely used onstage’, Susannah Clapp writes (LRB, 25 December 2025). She recalls only one ‘whiffy play’—Jerusalem, with its ‘tang of petrol’—in the last thirty years. Older theatregoers may not have forgotten Franco Zeffirelli’s National Theatre production, at the Old Vic in 1973, of Saturday Sunday Monday, a comedy adapted from the Italian original by Eduardo de Filippo. A legendary cast included Laurence Olivier, Frank Finlay, Martin Shaw, Anna Carteret and Joan Plowright. Plowright played a Neapolitan matriarch who spent most of the first act on stage cooking a ragu. An intense smell of onion, tomato and garlic flooded the theatre.”

Surely that beats petrol, even with the tifosi. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026