What is Europe’s fastest game bird? This, bizarrely enough, was the question that gave Sir Hugh Beaver, MD of the Guinness Brewery, the idea for a new reference book back in 1951. Four years later, and after various negotiations with famous fact-compiling brothers Ross and Norris McWhirter, Beaver watched proudly as the first ever edition of the Guinness Book of Records rolled off the presses… and straight on to the Christmas wish lists of millions of children across the globe.
Right from the outset, classical music records have featured in the annual publication, now known as Guinness World Records. Entries have ranged from the expected, such as loudest note, most expensive violin and so on, to more unlikely facts such as the longest harmonium recital.
Controversy has occasionally been courted in its pages. There was, for example, the case of Havergal Brian’s Gothic seemingly being discounted as the world’s longest symphony on the grounds of quality. Elsewhere, some ‘records’ seem to have been more of a case of subjective judgment rather than verifiable fact: how does one actually measure that, for instance, the ukulele is the world’s easiest instrument to learn, or that Florence Foster Jenkins is the worst soprano ever to have lived?
But let’s pass over that for now. Here, we celebrate 60 years of the best-selling tome by handpicking 15 musical records to intrigue and delight. Most can be found in the 61 editions published to date, others we feel really should have been included at some point…
15 fascinating musical records
1/ Oldest instrument
We’ll start our 15 records by heading back to the Upper Paleolithic age, an era when men lived in caves and cooked woolly mammoth for tea. What most people don’t know is that those caves may well have been adorned by the sound of mellifluous tootlings. In May 2012, the Journal of Human Evolution broke the news that, thanks to new carbon-dating methods, remnants of flutes found in the Geissenkloesterle Cave in Germany had been shown to be around 42,000 years old.
The existence of the flutes, which were made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, revealed that our ancestors started to enjoy making music far earlier than previously imagined. The first German jokes about England being ‘the land without music’ were undoubtedly being made around this time too.
2/ Longest piece
Unless there are significant advances in science and/or medicine in the near future, no-one alive today will be around long enough to hear the end of the performance of John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) that is currently taking place at St Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. When the US composer wrote Organ²/ASLSP in 1987, he neglected to give any indication as to how slow ‘as possible’ might actually be. And so, some bright spark in Halberstadt decided to take it to its very extreme.
The St Burchardi rendition began in 2001 and involves the organ keys being held down mechanically until the next change of notes is required. In general, such changes happen roughly once or twice a year, but with the music currently dwelling on a very long note in the score, the next one won’t be until 2020. The piece itself will finish in 617 years time.
3/ Fastest Bumblebee
The accolade of ‘Fastest Performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee on a violin’ is hotly contested. Recent holders have included German fiddler David Garrett, who in 2008 played it in 66.56 seconds, and English violinist Oliver Lewis, whose time of 63.356 seconds was witnessed by BBC Blue Peter viewers in 2010.
The speediest bee of all, though, is Lewis’s fellow Brit Ben Lee, who in December 2011 clocked 54.24 seconds. By our calculations, if he begins now, Lee could rack up over 2,292,000 Bumblebees before the next chord change in the Halberstadt Organ²/ASLSP gig. He may feel a tad exhausted.
4/ Oldest violinist
For Adelci Groia Paulino, it wasn’t speed but endurance that mattered. When the Brazilian violinist first tuned her instrument as a founding member of the Santos Municipal Symphonic Orchestra in 1950, she almost certainly wouldn’t have envisaged that she would still be plying her trade professionally for them an astounding 62 years later. Paulino was still playing in 2012, just short of her 97th birthday.
She passed away in 2014, but not before her longevity had been rewarded with the honour of the Order of Ipiranga by the State of São Paulo.
5/ Longest clarinet note
An endurance record of a different kind is held by one Philip Palmer. At Coppice Performing Arts School, Wolverhampton, in November 2006, Palmer played a single sustained note on the clarinet (i.e. without breathing) for 1 minute, 13.38 seconds – that’s 19 seconds longer than Lee’s Bumblebee.
6/ Wettest violinist
But back to Adelci Groia Paulino, who we imagine has never played under water. Or if she has, she wasn’t the first violinist to do so. That honour is held by Mark Gottlieb, who in March 1975 played a solo adaptation of Handel’s aquatic masterpiece, the Water Music at the Evergreen State College swimming pool in Olympia, Washington, US. Quite why this heroic but, frankly, pointless feat was deemed worthy of inclusion in 1980s editions of the Guinness Book of Records remains unclear, but we’re more than happy to celebrate it here.
7/ Lowest note
In June 2012, the Welsh composer Paul Mealor decided it would be a good wheeze to push the human voice to its very limits by including a low E in his new choral work, De Profundis – at 41.203 Hertz, that’s the E nearly three octaves below middle C. Given that basses who can reach that low aren’t to be found in your average village choir, Mealor then launched a competition called ‘Bass Hunter’ to find someone who could.
Step forward Tim Storms, a basso profundo extraordinaire from Indiana, US, who not only ambled down to Mealor’s bottom E with ease, but then showed he could carry on well beyond that – all the way, in fact, to the G seven octaves below the lowest note on a piano (0.189 Hz). Given that Storms is also quite handy at the high notes, he unsurprisingly also holds the record for the singer with the biggest recorded range.
8/ Longest bell ring
In the complex world of church bell-ringing, the ‘Complete Bob Major’ enjoys something of a legendary status. This is when all eight bells are rung in every possible sequence – a total of 40,320 ‘changes’ in all. This feat has only been performed once, and that was back in 1963 when, at a foundry in Loughborough, one Robert B Smith and his fellow campanologists rang for 17 hours 58 minutes. Trying to achieve a Complete Bob Major with 12 bells – 479,001,600 changes – would take nearly 38 years.
9/ Most symphonies
With 104 and 41 respectively, Haydn and Mozart are the names that spring most obviously to mind when discussing composers who wrote the most symphonies. That said, Dittersdorf (around 120 symphonies), Hovhaness (67) and Vanhal (51) also deserve a mention.
None even comes close, however, to the mighty Leif Segerstam (b1944) who, when not conducting blistering performances of fellow Finns Sibelius and Rautavaara, likes nothing more than to jot down a note or two of his own. At the time of writing, Segerstam has completed an astonishing 285 symphonies. A number of them, particularly the earlier ones, have been recorded and are well worth a listen.
10/ Greatest hand span
Unlike Leif Segerstam, Rachmaninov wrote just the three symphonies. He did, however, have very big hands. It is this latter fact that has earned the Russian composer and pianist a regular slot in the Guinness Book of Records under the heading ‘Greatest Span’ (as well as a strong finish in our list of the greatest pianists of all time).
A slightly arbitrary entry, perhaps? After all, just a little research would surely reveal that there are several others out there with even larger paws who can bash out at least a sonatina or two… Anyway, for the record, Sergey’s magnificent mitts could comfortably stretch a perfect 12th, from C to G.
11/ Grandest piano
One wonders what Rachmaninov would have made of the gargantuan piano built by Daniel Czapiewski, the largest ever to have been played in public. First unveiled in December 2010, the Polish architect’s masterful creation is over six metres in length, 2.5 metres wide and 1.88 metres high. And, for those bored of the conventional 88 notes, it has 156 keys to play around with.
Inscribed on its legs, meanwhile, are names of six leading Polish composers: Moniuszko, Paderewski, Karłowicz, Szymanowski, Górecki and, of course, Frédéric Chopin. It would make a lovely little addition to somebody’s front room, we’d suggest.
12/ Biggest baton
Conducting an instrument of Czapiewskian magnitude would doubtless require a baton of similar size. Ideal for the task, then, would be the one used to keep the players of Netherlands ensemble Harmonie Amicitia in strict tempo on 30 October 2010, which measured a spectacular 4.25m. Charged with waving – or, more likely, heaving – the mighty wand that day, and instantly beating his way into the record lists, was Dutch maestro Bas Clabbers.
13/ Longest encore
Did Clabbers treat his audience to an encore? Probably not. But then he wasn’t conducting in front of Leopold II, the man responsible for the longest encore in classical music history.
When Domenico Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (The secret marriage) was premiered at the Imperial Hofburg Theatre in Vienna in February 1792, the Austrian emperor was delighted. So delighted, in fact, that he asked to hear some of the music again – not just an aria or a duet, nor even a scene or two, but the whole bally lot, from start to finish.
And who would have been bold enough to refuse His Majesty’s wish? He did at least allow the performers to enjoy a quick bite of supper before gearing up for the re-run. Nice touch, Leopold.
14/ Longest hymn session
While we’re on the subject of lengthy sing-songs, let’s head next to Wesley Church in Cambridge where, from 7-9 February 1969, the Cambridge University Student Methodist Society held the longest ever ‘hymn-in’. Working their way through the Methodist Hymn Book, plus a handful of added requests, the Society sang 1,000 hymns in all, over a period of 45 hours 42 minutes. We will refrain from making the obvious comment about students having just that little bit too much spare time on their hands…
15/ Biggest tubaphernalia collection (come again?)
We round off our survey with without doubt the most important record of all. Yes, it’s the world’s biggest collection of tuba-related paraphernalia. This, we can reveal, belongs to R. Winston Morris, instructor of tuba at Tennessee Technological University and author of the Tuba Source Book. Morris began his collection 40 years ago and by January 2013 it had reached 2,286 items – keyrings, soft toys, you name it, so long as they are all tuba-related. Sadly, no such word as ‘tuberphernalia’ in fact exists. It should do.