This is what is popularly understood of the life of Sir Albus Manchild, and will have to stand for a summary biography: He was born John Albus Manchild in 1842 somewhere outside Edinburgh to an Irish mother and father of French ancestry, a textile merchant. He most likely had formal musical training in England, and developed his related interest in linguistics from his parents outside of school. It's a great mystery how he came upon his knighthood; the lack of formal documentation suggests that he did the Queen some favor of a personal nature or that the whole thing was fabricated. Severe punishments concerning the impersonation of a knight point to the former - whatever the case, from his early twenties on, he was referred to as Sir Albus. In this period, he began to find work composing for the theatre - work which would be his bread and butter, carrying him between Edinburgh and London for the rest of his life.

Though his theatre composition never slackened, he became personally dissatisfied with the formulaic modes of traditional music, and the real work of his life started when he began experimenting in his spare time with new sounds, new forms, new modes. Most of these experimental works were not commissioned; they were personal polemics, narrative or symbolic, taking as inspiration the sounds of nature or the melodies of folk music, real or invented. Many were never performed in Manchild's lifetime. If it's hard to place his compositions in the timeline of avante-garde music of the period, that's because Sir Albus's working method was so solitary and so contrary: in a time to which Liszt, Chopin, even fellow eccentric Alkan, had introduced atmospheric pieces unlike anything heard before, Sir Albus was putting melody - highly personal and symbolic melody - above mood, even above form. So, though his influences are hard to pin down, it's easy to see how he influenced melodists like Ravel, and even jazz composers like Duke Ellington (a self-proclaimed admirer).

The final years of Sir Albus Manchild are another of his many mysteries. It is believed that he went on a long voyage around the world, studying local musics and languages and possibly composing a last series of pieces. A number of scores have surfaced supposedly from this period, most recently the likely apocryphal "Curious Melodies" interpreted liberally by the Beston Barnett Quartet; none have been authenticated. He seems to have died at sea, but he was laid to rest in July of 1914 in a churchyard in Devonshire, where his family had moved during his school years and his descendants still live.

Here follows a selection of Sir Albus Manchild's more interesting pieces. Many of his works can be found, as scores or audio, online at the British Library Sound Archive.

"Lepidoptera" - an operetta, taking as its inspiration the colorful speciation of butterflies, libretto by Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (father of the famous novelist)

"The Realms of Prester John" - a symphonic cycle in which a young traveler visits the fabled lands of the mythical Christian King of the Three Indias. The movements are: 1. The Sandy Sea, 2. The Sciapod's Song, 3. The Amazon's Dance, 4. Seventy-Two Kings At Table, 5. Saint Thomas's Living Hand

"The Train" Symphonic evocation of the locomotive passage from London to Edinburgh, played as one movement. This piece, in which each pastoral element of the English landscape - sun, wind, hill, stream, village - is assigned its own melody and instruments and then allowed to mingle with the others creating a sense of passing scenery, contains the earliest known use of pizzicato cellos and basses to mimic the sound of a steam locomotive (an orchestral "trick" common in the soundtracks of the first half of the twentieth century).

"November's Tales" - the story of the drowning of the City of Is, retold successively by four of its victims: the Guard at the Gate, the Strange Horseman, the Queen Herself, and the Fisherman's Wife. Manchild wrote four prose-poems to be read over the string quartets, but the effect was very avante-garde, and the poems being somewhat risque in parts, the quartets have generally been performed without the accompanying readings.

"Useful Music" A compendium of some two hundred and eighty short melodies, each made for (as opposed to in imitation of) a specific quotidian activity. Some instructive examples are:

5. Song for Waking Up Hungry

11. Song for the Anticipation of Lighting a Pipe

12. Song After the First Puff on a Pipe

57. Song for the Return of a Hopeful Outlook to a Disappointed Mother

121. Song for Imagining What It Would Be Like To Be an Altogether Different Animal, Say, a Sparrow

122. Song for Transforming Oneself Into a Sparrow

123. Song for Transforming Oneself Into a Hydrangea

124. Song for Becoming a Rock

131. Song for Wondering About the Extent to Which One's Seemingly Inexhaustible Imagination Is Actually Hemmed In and Conditioned By Biology or Culture or Circumstance

172. Song for Wiping Up a Mess in the Kitchen While Whistling

218. Song for Misplacing One's Pencil, Then Finding Another

The melodies are rarely played sequentially or completely. When played at all, arrangements have been made of like-themed songs * which are then performed in a more traditional form.

* As an example, listen to the Brodsky Quartet's "Manchild Transformations: Useful Music 121-126"

"Les Choses Flottantes" ("Floating Things") A series of light-hearted duets for violin and cello, and by far Manchild's most popular work. His half-brother Aberforth le Tresfou, also an artist and inventor, by the use of mechanical wind-machines and a hand-held contraption of gauze and balsa like a great palm frond, could keep light objects such as paper, feathers, or a scarf floating over a stage for many minutes at a time, delighting audiences in Britain and on the continent as part of a traveling theatre. Manchild wrote these pieces as accompaniments to the show, and each was meant to mimic the tenor of the object's dance: "Rice Paper" is looping and full of surprises, "A Handful of Leaves" is flitting and nostalgic, "Peacock Feather" proceeds with a languid exotic grace.

"Trafalgar Square" A series of mostly comical etudes based on character sketches of people observed working in or passing through Trafalgar Square, thought to have been written in collaboration with Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki. *

* The hypothesized relation between Manchild and Soseki is based on contextual evidence alone. Through a kind of foreign exchange program, the young Natsume Soseki studied English literature in London in the years 1901-03, where he was fantastically homesick, and turned his loneliness towards writing experiments in his native language. Among his earliest unpublished works, there is a series of ridiculous character studies of British citizenry, many of which bear considerable resemblance to the vulgar muses of Manchild's "Trafalgar Square". (As an example, try listening to "Pig-Man Selling Charcoal" while reading Soseki's sarcastic piece, translated as "A Wild Boar in Winter".) It is not hard to imagine Manchild, who loved to work in a café on the Square, striking up an acquaintance with the younger Japanese man, even encouraging his experiments. Or possibly the two sat at separate tables without actually meeting and simply followed one another's gaze: in this unspoken way, sharing the joke of "The Sly Bookseller"/"A Trafficker of Souls", "A Gentleman About Town"/"The Drunken Master", or "Call to Wings for the Trafalgar Birds' Light Brigade"/"A Street Urchin and His Pigeons".

"Water Fugue" A strange, fantastical, and exceedingly complicated fugue written for ten flutes. Ten separate versions of the same long melody interact to evoke a burbling brook become stream become cataract become river. Notwithstanding the difficulty of getting ten flute players in a room together, the timing of the piece is notoriously difficult itself; where some strands of the fugue are separated by whole minutes, others chase one another by a sixteenth beat. Still, a signature piece for Sir Albus.

"The Lexicon" Dictionary of words and idioms, mostly English, transcribed into unique musical phrases. Unfinished and also impossible.* Also included under this heading are various unpublished melodies derived, via the methods of the Lexicon, from popular poems of the period. Manchild translated a number of Shakespearean sonnets, two psalms from the King James Bible, and a few contemporary poems into his invented musical language, however none of these attempts seems to possess anything like a natural musicality or listenability, excepting Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" which actually comes out quite nicely.

* Though few people even knew he was working on it, the Lexicon was Sir Albus' greatest disappointment. His idea was that every word in the English language (and indeed in any language) had a melodic signature, and he set out to catalogue these melodies using his own well-tuned ear. Of course, the obstacles to this task were insurmountable: words change melody with context, a phrase changes timbre considerably when cast as imperative, derogatory, questioning, sarcastic, ejaculatory, or pleading, and the rhythm of speech - excited, sleepy, serious, fiery, stuttering - is also context dependent. Aware of the difficulties, Manchild was at first convinced that the Lexicon was important enough to be finished by subsequent generations if he could not himself finish the job. Over time however, he realized that the Lexicon would not be able to capture all the colour and mystery of the English language: at best, it would codify his own individual perception of it. As he grew older, Sir Albus was less interested in music which shaped the listener's perceptions, and more interested in art which in some way created a space for the audience to pursue its own truth. The Lexicon, which he worked on for many years, came to represent exactly what he was leaving behind.