Duet aux Trio

Posted on Tue 8th Sep, 2020 @ 12:24am by

404 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Addams House, Music Parlor
Timeline: MD 8, 1800

Chlamydia Addams raised an eyebrow at her child, Experiment Number Six Addams. The child took a deep breath nodded slightly. She pulled the bow across the strings of her violin, releasing a sound like the shriek of a tortured soul. The note wavered and fell, and Chlamydia moved her own bow across the strings of her viola, a contralto note like a moan of agony resulting. These were the opening notes of the string duet "gymnothlípsi," written down over a century and a half earlier, during the turmoil at the dawn of Earth's twenty-first century, by Zlop Addams. In the background, the faint sound of a brush on a brass cymbal emerged as the pair's Zeta Reticulan spider, Thing, joined in.

The violin Six played was made of acoustic polymer, mostly translucent, though with a faint pink tinge which made it more easily visible. She had chosen it herself, after she had completed her first year of violin instruction and outgrown the original wooden child's model with which she'd started. The tone, she felt, was very neutral, not flavored by variations in the density or shaping of wood. It was, to her ears, pure.

Chlamydia, on the other hand, had chosen her viola for exactly the opposite reasons. It was a copy, precise to the molecular level, of Lupescu's Red Viola. Its red varnish obtained its color from human hemoglobin, believed to have belonged to the luthier's lover who had died of the bubonic plague. The tuning pegs, likewise, were carved from human bone; the strings were human hair, in this case, Chlamydia's own. Chlamydia loved the story of a passion which persisted beyond death, love which brought such beauty into the world. To her, the voice of the viola was a Human voice, crying to express love and loss and, yes... the naked grief to which her ancestor had composed the ode.

Thing moved from the brushed cymbal of falling rain to the thunder of tympani, the staccato pops of a goblet drum, the doom-beck. Both Chlamydia and Six had read Zlop's diary, knew that the drums represented bombs and firearms, expressions of the repressive might of the state against individuals deemed unnecessary. The wailing and moaning of the instruments carried the voices of the oppressed masses, crying to heaven for justice, and finding none.

They reached the end of the piece, a last long, low moan of exhaustion, and silence descended.

 

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