The Black Rondeau

So, here's the deal. Tristan is bedridden with COVID right now, so I'm taking over this week. Hell of a way to spend the New Year.

 

I'm Squirrel, musician and audio engineer by day, person-shaped thing that looks into cursed audio by night. Let’s talk about the Black Rondeau.

In our line of work, when you want to research the weird shit we find, sometimes you have to create or perform it. Sometimes that means you have to emulate the Hemaphytes and paint with your own blood, or put on a production of Love's Labours Surrendered, or playing a game of Calliope (never again). In my case, it means trying to perform various pieces of cursed music. Some stuff isn't too bad; sure, Everdeath's discography will make everyone who listens to it have a nosebleed, but that's only a danger if you're on blood thinners. But there is something I will never play again.

The Black Rondeau is an incomplete piece for cello from 1748, and the first recorded performance of it was in 1749, but the most infamous performance took place in Cleveland in the 1970s; if you've ever read about the Severance Music Hall massacre, you now know the cause. 

The sheet music that we have for it is seven pages long and can be played in about seventeen minutes, but it was originally believed to have been thirteen pages and required approximately twenty-three minutes of playtime. The last six pages were destroyed after the original performance.

The piece is notable for requiring two people to play it, despite technically being listed as a soloist piece. One person mans the fingerboard to help generate the chords, while the other actually plays the notes on the strings. It’s a difficult piece to play, and getting it wrong can cause horrible consequences. Getting it right can do even worse things-- again, Severance. 

The 1749 performance was a private one, held in Leipzig. Approximately thirty people were in attendance, and the performance was done by twins, Hans and Alfons Koch. Otto Koch, their father, composed the piece. Hans and Alfons were both cellists in an orchestra at the time, and both of them bemoaned the ease of the pieces they had to play; their father is said to have written their Rondeau in an attempt to challenge them. We’ll get more into what happened during this performance in a little bit.

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The performance I put on occurred in mid 2018. While I did the chords on the fingerboard, I had my brother, “Matt”, play the strings. It was an awkward set up, with me having to sit in his lap. We had an audience of ten people, seven from our community, and three willing participants from outside of it. We took all of the appropriate measures we could-- we left appeasements, we said prayers, we took showers to cleanse ourselves. But the whole time, I was afraid it might not have been enough.

One thing I have to stress about this: if you’re a student of classical music and manage to find a copy of The Black Rondeau and want to play it: don't. It's a test of endurance after you get through the last intact page, and can take anywhere from five minutes to six hours. You can not stop playing.

To play the Rondeau, the cello has to be tuned in a specific manner; the D string has to be slackened, which risks compromising the integrity of the instrument. By contrast, the A string has to be tightened to the point where, if you try to play pizzicato, you end up slicing your fingers open; this is completely intended.

The performance began with a standard canon progression. The sound it made was the musical equivalent of a train wreck-- it sounded utterly wretched, but it was completely enthralling. The three members of the audience from outside of the community tried covering their ears in some manner as we progressed through the first several bars. Matt was clearly uncomfortable playing his cello from high school in a manner that was potentially destructive to the instrument. But that discomfort was nothing compared to what came next.

At the start of the eighth bar of the piece, the playing instructions call for the person who’s manning the fingerboard to pluck the A string as hard as they can. Despite the thickness of the cello's strings, it drew blood. I gasped in pain, and those who weren’t in the community looked ill when they saw blood flowing down the fingerboard. But as it did, the tone of the music literally changed.

I felt like an entire symphony was grabbing onto the fingerboard beside me. Notes that could not have been played by one, two, or maybe even ten people resonated from the instrument, and the temperature plummeted. An invisible, slimy hand came up against my bleeding finger, and an invisible tongue licked my blood from between the strings. The good news was that we had begun playing it correctly: but without the final six pages, how it would go from there was up in the air.

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In 1749, Hans and Alfons began their performance to an audience of thirty, including some celebrities among the Electorate of Saxony’s musical scene. Accounts of the time confirm a similar finger-slicing to what happened here, with Hans being the one to spill blood. The music that came from the cello after this was described as ‘sonorous and wild… like a murder of crows learning  how to sing an aria’. 

As Hans’s blood flowed down the neck of the cello and began pooling onto the floor, it reportedly flowed uphill from the small pit where they were performing, and up into the audience. It stopped at the front row, and one of the people in attendance there reported that it felt like the blood was somehow ‘looking at me… as if a million invisible eyes were judging my reaction to the piece’.

Others reported feeling claustrophobic in a room that was big enough to hold an audience of two-hundred. One man felt something sharp pressed against and eventually into his skull, right above the eyes, but no blood was produced. Eventually, one woman-- the wife of a nobleman-- stood and bolted for the door.

She found it locked from the outside. And as she panicked, trying to pull it open, the music intensified. 

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The locked door was likely intended to contain whatever the hell the Black Rondeau summoned. Thankfully, times have changed, and now all that’s needed is a few powerful electromagnets to keep them from escaping.

These beings, what Alfons called ‘oneiroi’, had flooded the room. One of the non-Institute members stood and fled, screaming about how something was trying to strangle him. As he ran out, the electromagnet hummed, and I picked up the brief impression of something falling against the floor with a thump.

At the midpoint of the piece-- at the top of page six-- Matt was required to make his own sacrifice. He pulled away the cello’s bow as I plucked the strings during a brief interlude, and with a grunt of pain, yanked out a lock of his hair, jamming it it into the horse hair of the bow. He continued playing, and the oneiroi howled.

One of the other non-audience members, an older woman, looked around wildly; part of me wonders if she was looking for hidden cameras, like this was some kind of prank show. Our researchers just took notes, some discussing their experiences with each other. Once you experience an unsound or three first-hand, musical aberrations like this cease to really amaze.

Blood continued flowing from my finger, and as I turned the page, my heart sank; we were on the last one, but we had to keep playing to a point at which the oneiroi were satisfied so that they didn’t tear us apart. That happened before-- in 1749.

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We'll call the man who felt the blade by his eyes Sebastian. After seeing two people faint from fear, he decided to put a stop to the performance, drawing a pistol and aiming it at the performers. “Cease!” he called. “Cease this devilish music at once, or I shall silence you forever!”

Hans and Alfons either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. Another witness reported at least one of them crying, trying to pull his fingers away.

When Alfons moved to join his hair with the bow, Sebastian loaded and fired his pistol. The bullet hung in the air about three inches in front of the barrel, and was slowly flattened and molded by something. It reportedly glowed red-hot for a moment, before being rolled into a long, needle-like shape, and shoved into his eye.

Sebastian didn’t scream in pain-- he just stood, startled, as lead that was still practically molten metal penetrated his left eye and exited his right. His eyes became clouded by cataracts as he fell unconscious; he would not awaken for the rest of the performance.

That left everyone essentially glued to their seats until the song’s conclusion. Hans and Alfons kept playing like a gun hadn’t just gone off within ten feet of them.

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We reached the end of Page 7. From there, we had to keep playing to satisfy the oneiroi. Both Matt and I are musicians, but we’d never actively hurt ourselves performing, and this was starting to take a toll. We had some sheet music that we’d managed to adapt for this set-up, something from Beethoven. We could only hope it would suffice. 

The cut on my finger had started to scab over, so I plucked it open again. There’s only one non-community member in the audience by this point, a young woman. She kept trying to look over the shoulders of Institute members to read their notes; one of them invited her into an empty seat, and they began discussing what was happening. We had a new convert, maybe someone to replace us in case shit went fully sideways. 

There was some discordant muttering from the oneiroi. They recognized that we weren’t playing the music that called them forth in the first place, and several of them growled. I kept playing as we transitioned to a more modern piece, something from the 1920s. This seemed to satisfy them.

We renewed the sacrifices every few bars. I had to cut open my finger on the same string, and Matt had to pull out more hair and jam it into the bow while I improvised pizzicato. I felt sick, but there was no applause still, so we couldn’t stop. This was the most difficult performance of a cursed piece I’d ever pulled off.

Twenty minutes turned into twenty-five. Thirty. Forty. I lost count. The group members are looking worried, and a few of them are debating how to safely put a stop to the performance. I just had to keep going until I passed out, or the oneiroi applauded.

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Hans and Alfons failed to finish their performance.

After two more people collapsed from fright, with Sebastian barely breathing, someone in the audience took the initiative to storm the pit they were playing in. They were a Frenchman named Gernons, and they were directly responsible for the only death that night.

They strode up to the stage, and kicked Hans Koch in the sternum, driving them five feet away from the cello, and interrupting the performance. He began berating Hans in French; what he said is lost to time. But his kick drove Hans directly into a set of invisible arms. First, growling came from around Hans. Then, heat and music filled the room, tones that were both beautiful and incredibly angry.

The heat didn’t ignite Hans. It dried him out, ‘like a tomato’ as one account puts it. He shriveled into a leathery sack (no bones were reported as being seen) before an invisible knife began cutting off a piece of his skin from his back and forming it into a sheet. Blood was splattered onto the page, and musical notes formed on it.

Gernons took the music and fled the room, never to be seen again. All of the candles in the room flickered and died, before spontaneously re-igniting an unknown amount of time later; Alfons was curled up sobbing by the cello, which was completely shattered.

Another casualty resulted from that night; Sebastian, who was completely blind from the cataracts the oneiroi gave him, attempted to get surgery the next year. Said surgeon was a quack doctor, and Sebastian died from complications at age sixty-five.

You may have heard of him; his full name was Johann Sebastian Bach. 

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Two hours turned into two and a half, then three. I couldn’t feel my fingers. My mouth was a desert. I cried as I tried to stand upright, until my knees buckled, and I fell over, exhausted, tears in my eyes. I once played the violin for six hours, but I didn't have to self-harm every other bar.

There was whispering all around me, and for several minutes, I was sure I was done for. Someone in the group tried to pick up an electromagnet to contain the oneiroi swarming around me, but it would have been a temporary measure; they’ll eventually find me, and I’ll just become another piece of sheet music.

However, Matt managed to finish the performance with a flourish, before he also collapsed. Our eyes met as he landed on the floor and then closed, as we waited for the worst. I muttered for people to evacuate the room, but nobody heard me.

Then, the room broke out into thunderous applause. It’s like I’m in a stadium with the acoustics of a concert hall. My ears rang after three minutes, and it took another five for me to realize that they’ve dispersed. 

That one woman from outside of the research group was a nursing student. After she treated us with some help from one of the Institute's medics, she asked the typical questions (“What the hell was that?” “Who are you people?” “Is anyone going to believe me about this?” “How can I help?”) and the questions are answered in turn (“Long story”, “Concerned parties”, “Probably not”, “You already are.”). We gave her our Telegram link, and we got her on the path to help figure out some of the more bizarre parts of the world of media.

I haven’t played cello since, and even playing guitar is harder, thanks to the scar on my thumb. Like I said, I’m an audio engineer; because of this performance, a lot of the music I make nowadays typically involves a lot of MIDIs in the melodies.

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The piece of music made from Hans Koch’s skin is called the Bloody Minuet; a short piece, only one page, front and back. I’ve heard that performances of it have occurred as recently as 1995, but it’s fallen off of the face of the earth. Honestly, I’m not even sure if the Bloody Minuet is cursed, or if its just a novelty, with it being printed with human blood and skin. 

I'm one of the Institute's lead music experts, but I don't try to perform classical music anymore. The Black Rondeau was bad enough, but in 2020, I was subjected to one of the Posthumous Symphonies. I recoil at the sight of clarinets almost three years later.

Assuming Tristan's condition improves, he should be back next week. If not, we have plenty of other people who can do essays.