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I think that endlessly circulating post that claims to present an actual performance of John Stump’s “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz” but is in fact an arrangement of “U N Owen Was Her?”, Flandre Scarlet’s boss fight theme from the 2002 video game Touhou: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has to be the iconic example of Tumblr misinformation – not because of the blatantly misidentified music, but because every so often somebody reblogs it with a long-winded explanation that no, that’s not really John Stump’s “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, it’s an arrangement of “U N Owen Was Her?”, and here’s the real “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, followed by a link to a different arrangement of “U N Owen Was Her?”.
(For those popping up in the notes to explain that this particular bit of misinformation doesn’t originate on Tumblr, y’all, I never said it did. Almost none of the misinformation that’s popularly circulated on Tumblr actually originates here. I’m specifically talking about the pattern of some ostensibly helpful reblogger providing an essentially complete and correct explanation of what’s wrong with the original post and why, then proceeding to put forth a “corrected” version that’s somehow even wronger.)
Still, it’s pretty funny that this is so prevalent that most of the initial Google results have mislabeled U.N. Owen arrangements. I found a link in a comment section that lead to this,but I have no idea whether even that’s true. I’m inclined to believe it might be since it’s the only arrangement I found that isn’t a U.N. Owen piece, but honestly I don’t know anymore.
That’s a reasonable approximation of what the Death Waltz might sound like, if it were playable. Which it isn’t – to be clear, “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz” is an esoteric joke about certain conventions of musical notation that only incidentally resembles actual music. John Stump was an engraver specialising in sheet music, and he composed the Dealth Waltz as a parody of some of the odder examples of his craft that he’d encountered over the years.
I’m told that it’s hilarious, provided you have the right sort of musical background. You can judge for yourself!
(The page has been divided into parts for easier mobile viewing. You can find it all in one piece with a quick Google search, if so inlined.)
“Saxes move downstage” might be my favourite bit of notation.
I’m a fan of the single measure of absolute silence with an indicated tempo of seven hundred and eighty-eight beats per minute, personally.
There’s actually no rests written in that measure, so it’s unclear if that’s actually silence or just… nothing. (But repeated. Very important. The nothing must happen exactly twice.)
WHERE IS PAGE 2? THERE ARE TWO PAGES IN THIS PIECE!!!!
No, there aren’t. That’s another, related piece of misinformation; the page of sheet music that’s popularly circulated as the second part of “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz” – often in the context of the aforementioned “U N Owen Was Her?” arrangements – is actually taken from a completely different John Stump piece called “String Quartet No. 556(b) for Strings In A Minor (Motoring Accident)“.
(I encourage you to Google that one, too. It’s striking in its own way, if somewhat less nakedly chaotic than the Death Waltz.)
