Here’s an inter­est­ing thing you can do with a cane, play music on it. I came across in my web trav­els this won­der­ful gad­get cane where­upon a work­ing vio­lin was stuffed into a cane. Now I can’t attest to the sound of it (though I have dug up video on youtube of a Pochette Fid­dle which is very much related to a vio­lin cane in size, and no doubt tim­bre), I’m sure the it’ll do in a pinch for when, say, you’re in a fid­dle con­test with Satan. Hav­ing a fid­dle stowed away on per­son for such occa­sions could be a life saver. This whole busi­ness reminds me of The Steel Gen­eral in Roger Zelazny’s “Crea­tures of Light and Dark­ness” who had a col­lapsable banjo that fit into a com­part­ment where his heart used to be.

For the per­versely curi­ous here are some gor­geous pic­tures of a mid-19^th cen­tury violin-cane. Also here is some infor­ma­tion on the his­tory and use of these canes. As well here are some more pic­tures of another such cane.

Tags: Fun, Instruments, Music Traditions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 7:32 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.