Hindenburg Kills 17 Conservatory Students, or Uninsulated Conductor Strikes up the Band

In May 1937, seventeen nervous students at the Gottingen Conservatory were set to become "the world's first launched chamber group," until each member and instrument in the ensemble became a part of the worst catastrophe the dirigible industry had known. Disaster-wise, the Hindenburg was a tremendous catastrophe, exiling hydrogen gas permanently to the "dangerous" upper-left corner of the periodic table, and officially rescinding the brief public favor it had gained as an ingredient to Gerd von Kuchler's "H-Two-Oh!" fizz drink, invented earlier that year. Music-wise, however (and we must applaud the backing band for this one), the Hindenburg turned out an unexpected success; in a confused act reminiscent of Wagner's Fuck-all operas, the torn pocket of the fiery dirigible scattered into the sky what onlookers recognized and heard as wind-blown instruments. The voices next staggered, one by one, as chorus members began their appropriately fortissimo free-falls; air currents guided the soprano voices far from the plummeting basses, but all converged, in a perfect final cadence, on the ground below.

"Beautiful," said New Jersey onlooker Cambia Atwood, a blind ex-socialite who nonetheless had a great ear for music. "But frightening." Apparently Cambia, raised on Beethoven and Brahms, had the same problem with this unexpected variety of German music that ordinary Americans had with the Nazis.

"No damn good," replied ordinary American and brusque film star John "Periodic" Favor. In a related story, it seems one of Gottingen's violists bore a striking resemblance to Favor, enough so that, when the musician's somehow unscathed head was discovered, sans corpus, in Cambia's garden, her neighbors proclaimed it to be none other than Favor's uprooted gourd. The shameless publicity forced Cambia to make quite a show of it; though she couldn't care less, she enshrined the thing in formaldehyde, the residues of which eventually killed her begonias.

For Favor, however, the German violist's head spelled trouble for his emerging career; a dream to that effect was among the worst he had ever envisaged. Reckless industry talk about his Nazi ties and his particularly strange choice of instruments brought such ill upon his name that he was forced to take on roles as Jim Smith in The Reason We Fight and as The Flautist in The Flautist at Iwo Jima, a film that eventually killed his career. The poor violist's body and viola were never recovered.

Kamikaze Lacks Motivic Variation

In January 1945, more in the spirit of dada than of kamikaze, Aki Fujiwara, a Mitsubishi technician and air force pilot, strapped an impressive amount of audio-recording equipment to his landing gear and doggedly took off from an Iwo Jima runway, intending to record his plane's ascent and descent over enemy territory. It's not known whether our pilot considered the metaphysical trappings of his plan, but evidently his mind was preoccupied with something. Immediately after take-off, in an absurd scene that, until then, had been proposed only by wartime Tom and Jerry cartoons, he accidentally piloted the plane into the division bunker, killing everyone inside.