Existing in a vacuum

Daily life also barges into the realm of instrumentation. Three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher famously, written in 1956 for the first of Gerard Hoffnung’s London concerts of caricature. It’s a piece that now should be left to period instrument orchestras, as only upright vacuum cleaners of the 1950s (below) are able to generate sufficient noise. A typewriter rules the roost in Leroy Anderson’s (1950), though its classical debut occurred in 1917 during Satie’s , in the company of milk bottles, a foghorn, rifle and other ‘found’ sounds. Four Parisian taxi horns honked their way into Gershwin’s (1928), recently becoming the subject of scholarly debate about their exact tuning. But it has taken the contemporary Swedish composer Hanna Hartman to reach the pinnacle in this field with (2017), scored for amplified potato starch and a bouncy toy ball. You’ll never want to listen to a Stradivarius again.