“The Ostinato Phrase” by Michael C. Keith

To my ear they had also a peculiar music.

Charlotte Bronte

Fierce March winds roared up Seventh Avenue causing pedestrians to lean forward to keep from being knocked over. Inside the entrance to a parking garage across from fabled Carnegie Hall stood a solitary figure playing a violin. Occasionally, passers-bye would drop a coin into an open instrument case at his feet. The unusually tall and slender musician would nod his approval while continuing to play.

The compositions he offered were his own, and therefore foreign to all those who heard them. Most were improvised and often with curious and unusual results. They were not without merit, but none had been published. Their composer was not interested in material recognition. He was content to play his music and cared little for the trappings of success or fame that might come from his innovations.

Late one afternoon as members of the New York Symphony streamed into the hallowed hall across from the obscure instrumentalist a melody he improvised caught their attention. It was something exceptionally unique and exotic, and it had an immediate and powerful impact on the musicians who heard it. Members of the city’s esteemed orchestra paused and peered in the direction of where the captivating descant originated before moving on through the stage door.

By the time the symphony’s members were tuning their instruments in preparation for that evening’s performance, the extraordinary musical phrase had embedded in their minds, only to manifest itself in the midst of a rendition of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. The intrusion was not spurned by the audience but rather enthusiastically embraced by it. Performed as an encore, it was soon the sole piece of music to fill the grand venue.

Those listening to the performance at home or in their cars were equally enthralled by the repeated musical strain. As the hours passed, the inexplicable effect spread. More and more people fell under the spell of the entrancing chords and were completely immobilized them. Normal activity across the city and nation and soon throughout the larger world ceased as the whole human race become fixated on the arresting notes.

As days became weeks, the only activity occurring on the planet was the mimicking of and listening to the prepossessing divertissement created by the lone Seventh Avenue street minstrel. Everyone had somehow been rendered incapable of engaging in anything else. Routine activities were abandoned. Basic needs were neglected and many people began to grow ill and die. Indeed, and over a far shorter amount of time than might have been expected, the human race perished from the earth . . . but the shard of melody that had caused it played on and on.

 ***

Recordings of the narcotizing musical phrase continued to fill the air as the planet was visited by occupants from another world. The benign aliens were responding to the Arecibo message broadcast into space in 1974 and were shocked by what they found upon arriving. The planet’s once dominant life form appeared to have simultaneously expired from some unknown cause. What further confounded the alien travelers was an ever-present sound pouring from an array of still-operating audio devices.

After searching the planet unsuccessfully for extant intelligent life, the foreigners departed to pursue the coordinates conveyed in another communiqué they had received from a different part of the galaxy. It was with great disappointment that the visitors moved on to their next rendezvous, since they had been very keen on making contact with Earth’s indigenous species.

Less than a light year away from the planet, the curious sound the extraterrestrials had encountered suddenly emerged in their own vast brains and took hold of their thoughts, supplanting all others. As had been the case with Earth’s inhabitants, the aliens found they could do nothing but listen as their spacecraft soared toward its next destination.

Michael C. Keith writes fiction and teaches college. www.michaelckeith.com