Wee little Anton Bruckner
When wee little Anton Bruckner was little and wee, his parents forced him to take up the organ. Little wee Anton hated the idea of taking up the organ but his parents felt strongly that Anton needed to learn how to pull out all the stops. And so, from the wee little age of three and three quarters, little wee Anton sat way up in the organ loft of the Church of the Holy Redeemer and received organ tuition from the great Austrian organist Bentz Von Bentzenheim. The lessons took place every Saturday afternoon and lasted exactly five hours and seven minutes. After a time, wee little Anton found himself enjoying the lessons more and more because the sound he could produce on that instrument was anything but little and wee.
One rather chilly spring day, Anton was out in the lonely, lonely Austrian woods all by his little wee self when suddenly he was roughly seized upon by six eight-year old ruffians. They taunted him with taunts and shouted shouty things at him, You’re an organ! He’s an organ! You’re an organ! He looks like an organ!
I’m not an organ, he peeped back in his little wee voice. I play the organ!
Ha! Ha!, they laughed. He plays with his organ!
When little wee Anton Bruckner was just seven he thought he might try his hand at composing a symphony. Where he came up with this preposterous and doomed-to-fail idea is unclear. He sat his wee little bum down on the porch steps and almost instantly thought up a simple but rather morose little tune. This excited wee little Anton to no end and he promptly waltzed into the kitchen where Mrs. Bruckner happened to be baking a poisonberrystrudel and little wee Anton shouted, Dearest Moomy! Dearest Moomy! I’ve composed a symphony, and proceeded to whistle his morose little tune.
Well, Mrs. Bruckner shrieked shrieks and howled howls and dropped her poisonberrystrudel on the kitchen floor at the sound of her little wee Anton whistling his morose little tune. It was so dreadfully morose and so horribly somber, so frighteningly painful to the ear that she whacked wee little Anton’s bum and sent him flying back out on to the porch. But instead of landing on the porch, wee little Anton bounced with his wee little head down the steps and landed with a crack! on the Austrian grass.
Wee little Anton needed 14 miniscule stitches to mend his little wee head and Dearest Moomy sent him to bed without any strudel, so shaken was she from the day’s events. And so frothy was her hatred of wee little Anton’s morose little tune.
That evening, little wee Anton lay in his bed, and carefully put his wee fingers to his head. As he gently moved his finger along the miniscule stitches he felt not the pain he had felt landing on the Austrian grass but the abhorrence with which his mother had reacted to his symphonic tune. She had hated his symphony, had absolutely despised the magnificent tune that he had conjured out of nothing. And as he lay in the Austrian quiet, he heard his tune.
gábor tarján, composer/percussionist 