Schuberg Humperdinkle was a teenage musical genius. If you grabbed hold of all the musicians in the world and tossed them in a heap he’d be right there at the top of the pile. If musicians were butterflies, Schuberg Humperdinkle was an Atlas moth. If they were insects, he was the Hercules beetle. He was a metaphorical giant among men and a figurative goliath among musicians
There was no instrument he couldn’t play. When he was at the piano, he was lightning and thunder rolled into one musical explosion. Bolts of genius and sparks of talent and rumbles of eccentricity emanated from him on stage. When he was with the violin, strains of melancholy and vibes of passion filled the room. He played the flute with the magic of an Arcadian swain, lost in the pastures of a distant heaven. He played the trombone with the passion of a bull elephant in musth. He strummed the guitar with the delicate touch of an angel floating on a pink cloud.
Where ever he went, Schubert Humperdinkle heard music. He heard music in the celestial sphere—the deep baritone of an ancient universe. He heard music in the ocean—their ebb and flow and rise and fall reminiscent of the crescendos and diminuendos of the greatest classical pieces. He heard music in the change of seasons. Spring was an avalanche of sound: thrusting minuets, flowering waltzes, and budding andantes. Summer was a harmonious flush of beat bop and rock n roll. Autumn was a melancholic adagio rustling and lulling the listener into a lazy stupor. And winter was alternately a nostalgic piano suite and a discordant white noise.
But he didn’t simply think that the seasons, the celestial sky, and the oceans were like music. He felt their inherent music. He called it the music without sound. People laughed at this notion. He asked them if they ever sang a song in their head and enjoyed the experience. There was no sound, but what was it that gave them pleasure? What about musical notes in a book? Do they count as unheard music? Wasn’t there more to music than just vibrating sound waves? Couldn’t music exist as a concept? Could one not appreciate rhythm and rhyme in some form of abstraction?
Schuberg believed music could exist without sound just as poetry could exist without words. He looked at the world around him and he was bathed in a flood of music. Just as the physicists tell us that all matter manifests itself thought its interaction with the Higgs Boson, Schuberg was who he was because of his interaction with music. He saw musical notes in the billboard signs and neon lights of the city. He heard music in the wind. He felt music in the rays of sunlight and in the drops of rain.
He was a creature of pure music. His works thrilled everyone around him. Reams of musical notes poured from his fevered brain. Songs, hymns, arias, ballads, dirges, carols, sonatas and cantatas were produced at a dizzying rate.
But to what spellbinding heights he would scale the world would never know. For at the age of 18 he was presented with an Xbox 360 4GB Console with built-in wi-fi, a black wireless controller, a composite A/V cable, and a Kinect Sensor. He had never seen anything like it. It was pure entertainment. He was hooked.
The X Box was the seventh guitar string, the eighth musical note and the sound of silence all rolled into one. Why play music, Schuberg figured, when you could play the X Box?
