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Dr. Dan Warburton giving a lecture-demonstration of the sound potentials of the Kloz violin to the Prime-Minister, at the Warburton Community Centre, Petermann, Western Australia. [UPI Archive Photo, 1997] |
Though generally assumed to have been made by Mittenwald's
Sebastian Klotz (1696 — 1768), according to the name on the label found
inside the violin (whose date, as we shall see later, is not genuine), new
information has recently come to light (1) to indicate that the "Jo Doc Klotz"
was in fact the work of Sebastian's son Joseph's eccentric half-brother, Radu
Klotz (1757 — 1819), an unsung hero in the history of instrument design
and manufacture. Trained as a trombonist, Radu Klotz's first attempts at instrument
creation were aimed at producing a "streichposaune", a hybrid stringed wind
instrument, half trombone, half violin. (2) His idea was to construct a violin
whose neck could be extended by the performer in a manner analogous to the
trombone's slide, but this innovation led to the intractable problem of finding
new material for the violin strings, traditional catgut proving to be not
sufficiently elastic in this respect. Convinced that material originating
in other animal intestines could provide the desired solution, Radu embarked
on a secret but systematic slaughter of animals (domestic and otherwise) in
the Mittenwald region, his vivisectional zeal quickly leading to his being
branded as a Satanist by the local community. He was duly expelled from the
Church (though not without giving a spirited performance as Lucifer in the
Oberammergau Passion Plays of 1796, a role for which he was apparently well-suited
according to documentary evidence of the period (3)), and subsequently moved
to Vienna in 1800, where he dedicated the rest of his life to composition
of an extremely quiet and ascetic nature ("minimal" in today's parlance) as
an act of penitence to atone for his turbulent past (4).
After Radu's departure for the Austrian capital, the Klotz family to raise
the money necessary to compensate local farmers for the loss of their livestock
auctioned off his remaining possessions. These included several finely crafted
violins which, in order to increase their saleable value, were labelled by
his son Joseph (1743 — 1819) as being by Sebastian but erroneously dated
(hence the "1799" inscribed upon the label in the "Jo Doc Klotz"). The Jo
Doc Klotz was duly bought in 1801 by one Wilhelm Bang of Munich (1770 —
1806), a fiddler of military precision and member of the five-piece Bavarian
folk ensemble Die Töten Lederhosen, a group which acquired something
of a cult following in the beer halls of Munich until an acrimonious dispute
between its two horn players, Wilhelm Brötzmann and Peter Breuker, as
to who could consume more beer and still remain standing, led to its dissolution
(in both senses of the word) in 1805. Bang, thinking the onomatopoeic nature
of his surname might bring him fame and fortune in the military, subsequently
moved north and enlisted in the Prussian Army. Taking his violin to the front
in 1806 to raise the morale of his fellow troops, Bang was unfortunately killed
in battle at Iena on October 14th, and the violin, along with other artefacts,
ended up in the possession of a young French aristocrat lieutenant, Louis-Olivier
Chas de Bourne (1778 — 1846), who, being totally tone-deaf, gave it to
his artistically inclined young sister Eugénie as a Christmas present
later that year.
Eugénie Chas de Bourne (1794 — 1879) grew up to be a leading philanthropist
and mainstay of the Parisian salon circuit in the latter part of the 19th
century. In addition to being a talented musician (she also played classical
guitar and was one of the first acclaimed banjo virtuosos in France), Eugénie
was a noted entomologist, her seminal "Les Insectes et le monde occidental"
(5) still acclaimed as an essential reference text to this day. On her many
travels to document France's indigenous butterfly species, she often took
her beloved Klotz violin, occasionally using it to store specimens (the characteristic
buzz of Jo 'Doc' Rosenberg's legendary "Rukowski" recordings (6) is perhaps
due to the continued presence inside the violin of several unhatched butterfly
pupae). On the 28th of January 1871, after the inhabitants of the French capital
finally surrendered to the besieging Prussian forces, the Chas de Bourne's
hôtel particulier in the rue du Chat qui Pète in the heart of
the Latin Quarter was ransacked by marauding Prussian public health inspectors
in search of the Turkish émigré Mustapha Kebab, who had apparently
been serving up dogs and rats to famished locals during the siege, and making
a healthy profit in the process. (7) Eugénie's banjos and guitars were
unceremoniously flung into the Seine, but, on noticing the Klotz label inside
the violin, a young Prussian officer, one Alfred X. von Schlippenbach (1842
— 1919), spared the instrument a watery death, taking it back with him
to the family home in Wuppertal. In his declining years, seeing his beloved
Kaiser Henry and his Reich in difficulties during the First World War, von
Schlippenbach sold the instrument to finance his Globe Unity Party, a dubious
alliance of beer-drinking Aryan thugs who attempted to import into Europe
the inflammatory rhetoric of nascent American Black Independence activists.
Thus it was that the Jo Doc Klotz was sold to one Jascha Rosenberg in 1917,
who came across it in a pile of old clothing at Kowald's Dreigroschenmarkt
in Wuppertal.
Little is known of Jascha Rosenberg (1870 — 1941) other than the oft-stated
fact that he emigrated to Australia in 1918, "a somewhat depressed personality"
(8). Recently-unearthed diaries (literally so — they were discovered
in a Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin buried in Rosenberg's garden behind the
family home in Wagga Wagga) reveal that this depression was not in fact due
to Jascha's floundering career as a Zeppelin sales rep, but rather to the
lack of interest in his work as an experimental film maker. It seems Rosenberg
left Germany for Australia accompanied by two fellow pioneers in avant-garde
cinema, Werner Hedgehog (9) and Rainer Werner Dafeldecker (10), but whereas
their work has recently been rediscovered and restored, no copies apparently
exist of Rosenberg's films (11). Fortunately, however, his beloved Klotz violin
survived — but only just: the instrument was frequently fought over by
Jascha's two sons Johannes and Jo, not because either of the boys actually
wanted to play it, but rather because it came in handy as an impromptu cricket
bat for school matches (Jascha stubbornly refused to buy his children any
cricket gear, considering such a purchase a gesture of surrender to the English
whose victory in the First World War had forced him, or so he claimed, to
flee his native Germany).
When Johannes began studying with Josef Kreisler in 1932 at the age of eleven,
this latter provided him with an instrument "borrowed" from his brother Fritz
(12), and Jo (about ten years old at the time) appropriated the Klotz. From
then on, it was his constant companion throughout the tumultuous period of
artistic activity that culminated in his imprisonment in HM Broken Hill, New
South Wales in 1948 (13). Like Basil Hallward's celebrated portrait of Dorian
Gray in Wilde's famous novel, the Jo Doc Klotz was to "bear the burden of
his passions and sins, [...] seared with the lines of suffering and thought."
The instrument received numerous scratches during Rosenberg's time on the
road with the Joseph Holbrooke Hot Four (14), though experts have also suggested
that these might have occurred during the preliminary experiments in musical
memory-location that Rosenberg later formalized as "Boo Theory" (15).
Worthy of special mention here though is the word "HORN" which is clearly
visible on the back of the instrument. This mysterious inscription has long
fascinated Rosenberg scholars: what could it possibly mean? Some have seen
it as a reference to his brother Johannes' work with the Epimenides Paradox
(16), but we can finally reveal the true story. Rosenberg's fame as a bebop
violinist spread round the world after his imprisonment in Broken Hill, and
the story of his unjust and cruel detention inevitably came to the attention
of musicians and activists in the United States who were campaigning for the
release of James Brown (who, by the way, was sentenced to several years hard
labour in the gulags of South Carolina in October 1988 for nothing more than
burning a red light because he was late for his violin lesson). Contact was
established between the Godfather of Soul and the Godfather of Bebop Violin
in 1989 (17), and plans were quickly made for an album together, masterminded
by former Brown associate Fred Wesley and Dr Funkenstein himself, Bill Clinton
(18). When consulted as to whom he would like to have in the brass section,
Rosenberg was writing the words "HORNY HORNS" (19) on a piece of HM Broken
Hill prison notepaper resting on the back of his violin when he realised to
his horror that his trusty Bic had engraved the first four letters of the
name into the wood of his instrument. Overcome with grief at the unintentional
desecration of his beloved violin, Rosenberg interpreted the unfortunate occurrence
as a portent of bad luck, and withdrew from the project with Clinton. Thus
was the world deprived of what would have no doubt been a truly awesome P-Funk
masterpiece. The value of Rosenberg's instrument inevitably plummeted, and,
unable to sell it to raise the required protection money to pay off the corrupt
wardens of Broken Hill (whose intervention was, sadly, often necessary to
protect Rosenberg from the unwelcome attention of several sex-starved inmates,
notably Joe "Hell" Leandre, aka The Maneater), he eventually donated it to
the Warburton Community Centre, located way out in the middle of nowhere in
Petermann, Western Australia.
The instrument remains to this day one of the Centre's prize exhibits, along with Johannes Rosenberg's triple neck, double piston, wheeling violin and an early electronic instrument, "le râteau électronique" invented by Eugénie Chas de Bourne (see above), but has been graciously lent to Dr. Dan Warburton (apparently a distant relation of the original Warburton who founded the godforsaken place) for this appearance at the Festival at Mains d'Oeuvres, St. Ouen, France, February 2002. Interested parties are cordially invited to approach Dr. Warburton after his performance (if they are still living, that is) and will be able to inspect the instrument itself.