Strange Musical Instruments of the World

Number 13: the Gurglephonium

"Oh for heaven's sake Benjamin, forget about the bloody gurglephonium, nobody likes the wretched thing." These are the infamous words spoken by Sir Horace Spasm when reviewing an early draft of Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, and the poor instrument has languished in obscurity ever since.
A poor cousin of the treble-splintered hacking tuba, the gurglephonium, once described by Schubert as sounding like the death-rattle of a consumptive pygmy with tonsillitis, first gained prominence in the Sunday morning markets of Moorish Spain. Here, engulfed in a cacophony of frenzied bartering, sneezing livestock and ear-splitting belches, desperate carpet merchants would draw attention to their colorful wares by exhaling into gaily decorated gurglephoniums. The result was often either a slit throat or an invitation to give a recital at that year's Eunuch's Jamboree.
Stanislaw Maniak was the first and only modern composer to incorporate the gurglephonium into a symphonic setting, albeit with zero success. His seminal Third Symphony: The Queasy met with a chorus of deafening boos when it premiered in 1872, and Stanislaw died two years later in a Polish lunatic asylum. With the exception of esoteric state functions at the Ruritanian court of Rudolph the Deaf, the gurglephonium disappeared from musical concerts altogether after the Maniak tragedy, and never was the phrase "Rest In Peace" more appropriate than when it was carved on Stansilaw's tombstone.
Aside from Benjamin Britten's aborted attempt, several other crusades to revive interest in the gurglephonium have been launched during the twentieth-century. Chamber pieces by musicians such as Schitberg, Moronovich and Bufoonokovski have all been greeted with various degrees of indifference and contempt, but curiosity concerning the gurglephoniums potential still persists in many of the world's most avant-garde basements, garages and maximum security prisons.