Hurdy-Gurdy Fest February 12, 2009

In a temporary drought of genuine sociopathic postmodern activity—with which my life is usually filled—as a genuine punter I attended a hurdy-gurdy festival. It was somewhere in the Peaks, sometime before this summer and not fictional.

This is a Hurdy-gurdy.

My mini-adventure quickly gathered a dark cloud.  You will be familiar with those protracted scenes and chapters in Brecht or Chekov in which the situation is laid out slowly with perfect structural clarity. Scenes in which events are presented carefully as if in a fable or parable, yet no rationale is provided that might enable one to understand and no moral of the story exists… 

There is something ineffably wrong with hurdy-gurdies. 

It’s as if the guy who invented the violin was disappointed. ‘The bagpipes are better’ he thought, ‘How can I make a violin-bagpipe?’  The result is decidedly dubious.  It can pretty much play only in one key.  The reason being that, and I think I quote, “The drones would sound really shit in the others”.  

I cannot understand.

Think. What do you hate about bagpipes? That is the drone.  The drones on a hurdy-gurdy make any semblance of a melody so difficult to pick out that you become transfixed. Not due to any real fascination but in an attempt to hear anything, anything, but the drone. It sounds to me like nothing more than the deep sound of a giant dentists drill working its way through bone.  

As if the monster was not complete, the inventor of the hurdy-gurdy added the ‘loose bit of wood’. This ‘loose bit of wood’ creates the effect that the entire performance—that which is evident above the headfuck that is the drone—is half obscured by the white noise created by its infernal buzz. 

This ‘loose bit of wood’ is apparently standard; an important element of the hurdy-gurdy. I cannot begin to conceive of how this was decided.  

I really don’t understand the situation.  

The hurdy-gurdy people appear not to have a qualitatively different experience of their instrument than I.  They get it. It is an objective fact: hurdy-gurdy sounds nasty.

I talked to John, a man at the festival, he said: 

“A bloke played hurdy-gurdy on stage. Afterwards the soundman was like, ‘Mate I’m sorry, I tried everything but I couldn’t get rid of that awful hum.’” 

“Ha, ha!” John guffaws before winding his hurdy-gurdy to life with a disgusting creak.

Such is the self-deprecating humour of the hurdy-gurdy player, a humour accompanied by a certain maniac edge.  Is the mania the cause of wilful self-exposure to the noise, or merely a symptom?  

I am still quite disturbed by John, the only excuse available for his behaviour is Autism. My facial expressions alternated frequently between a social nausea worthy of Sartre and simple childish mirth and yet John reacted to neither.  He continued winding the handle of his hurdy-gurdy—nestled to his groin perversely as if a terrible suckling infant—with the air of a Spanish Inquisitor nonchalantly winding the wheel of a torture rack.

I know exactly what happened.  Structurally the description which I possess of a hurdy-gurdy festival is accurate.  

I cannot understand.