The correspondence desk at the Thrupiece Organisation is always busy, but there has been an unusual amount of activity over the last few days following the reprint and republication of Dr Stanton Fisher's appreciation of composer and musicians' rights activist Eric Fishwick. Is this because of the Thrupiece Philharmonic Orchestra's pioneering recording of his Yorkshire Symphony perhaps? Well yes and no!
More intriguing is the interest generated by one of the photographs featured in Dr Fisher's article - that of Eric with an "unidentified acquaintance" in Batcombe in 1958. Norwegian Thrupiece scholar and facial recognition expert Reteena Skånė takes up the story ...
Dear Sir
I was intrigued by the photograph of composer and musicians' rights activist Eric Fishwick with an "unidentified acquaintance" featured in the recent reprint of Dr Stanton Fisher's Eric Fishwick: An Appreciation (RDAM/Threadbone Press). Using the advanced facial recognition techniques which I have pioneered here in Norway and drawing upon my extensive expertise as a registered Thrupiece scholar, I believe I can say with 59% certainty that the "unidentified acquaintance" in question is none other than Professor (Sir) Brian Thrupiece.
Further I have corroborative evidence that the two gentlemen met during Eric's visit to the West Country: a photograph of the two pondering a manuscript in Radio Corfe Mullen's Studios. This leads to an intriguing and by no means fanciful proposition: might the composer's famous "composers' block" have been eased not by the recognition of a vaguely familiar landscape feature but by therapeutic sessions with the Professor who, as is well documented, was famous for "getting people to do things they didn't want to do" (see Shelley Lulette-Sizemore "A thousand and one nights with the Professor", Dorset Institute for Psychiatric Research Occasional Papers No 94 (2012)).
If Ms Sizemore's account is to be believed (and I believe it is) the Professor used advanced tantric techniques (in conjunction with significant amounts of alcohol) to overcome a subject's resistance thereby allowing him to do more or less anything he wanted to them, with or without their consent.
It's just a thought, but it would be good to think that the orchestral masterpiece "Wortley Hall" came about through the interventions of Dorset's leading culinary bio-ethicist.
Sincerely
Reteena Skånė
Trondheim Instute for Advanced Photogrammetry
Photograph enclosed
EDITOR'S NOTE: Though the photograph undoubtedly shows Professor Thrupiece in Radio Corfe Mullen's Studio, considerable doubt must attach to the identification of Eric Fishwick whose hair was - Basil Pesto's famous pomade notwithstanding - "never crinkly". (See RNCM Portrait in Dr Stanton Fisher, Eric Fishwick An Appreciation (RDAM/Threadbone Press.) The gentleman portrayed may well be Geoffrey Wheeler a well-known television presenter of the time (see Top of the Form BBC Television (1948-1986)) though might be a young Max Bygraves (See Thrupiece, B. "He's a pink toothbrush: Max and me" (DHRA Summer Newsletter, December 2002))
Professor Thrupiece (left) and Eric Fishwick (right) discuss the latter's Tone Poem "Wortley Hall" in the studios of Radio Corfe Mullen in October 1958: or so says Norwegian facial recognition expert Reteena Skånė. Sources close to the late Professor have their doubts.
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