Actually it's a bit rich starting this new thread on the C21st board; but there is a tentative reason, and anyway I wanted to follow Richard's prompt to liven it up and this is first thing that entered my head.
Have a butcher's at this:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6202644The book is, of course, a total hoax (maybe some people remember reading about it? It seems to have got a bit of coverage in the USA at least, including this piece on NPR's 'Morning Edition' - the US equivalent of our Today programme). What's impressive is the lengths this bloke went to. All the recordings (a few are linked in the above article) are fake, as is the correspondence from the Vatican contained in the book, as are the masonic-esque illustrations etc. etc.
All amusing enough. Why I'm posting about it here, though, is because of this guy's claim that he wanted to "expand the notion of musical composition to encompass the creation of an entire artistic genre, with its necessary accompanying history, mythology, philosophy, social function, etc." I'm initially torn between reading this as a post-Wagnerian piece of inflated self-regard, or a piece of waffly hype (the most likely in reality of course), or as a potentially interesting half-idea for the future. (Or at least it seemed so, a bit, when I started typing that last sentence. Now, I'm starting to glaze over, so I'll stop.)
