Things and Stuff, part one of a series of ten thousand

The photo in this post is of an old mellophone mouthpiece I  brought from house to house to house to house. I don't know if you know what a mellophone is. Today people play the marching mellophone which looks like an oversized trumpet with an enormous bell. 

This mouthpiece is from the earlier version, a "marching French horn," which was shaped like the orhestra instrument, but was made of less-dentable, more weather-resistant metal. Sometime in the late 1980s, I owned one of these marching French horns, and the case (which was lined with blue plush fabric) held two mouthpieces. When I sold the horn, I kept one of the two. 

 I don't really know why. I think it was a remembrance of the horn, which I missed but never had time to play. And I think the buyer had gotten a good deal on the instrument and case and I felt that the extra mouthpiece made the purchase a little too sweet. And I was used to this mouthpiece and thought that I might get another horn and I'd use this mouthpiece instead of the one that came with the horn. 

 I enjoyed having the mouthpiece around, and I used to keep it near my desk in whichever of the four houses I occupied. Last summer, I got around to hunting up another marching French horn, and I found a doozie -- a model that comes with tube extensions so you change play the instrument in two different keys. Neat-o. It didn't come with a mouthpiece, which is often the case with old horns. They can't be stored with the mouthpiece in the receiver, or the metal will form a chemical connection between the stem of the mouthpiece and the tube you put it into and you have to go to a shop and pay someone forty bucks to extract the mouthpiece with a special puller. So the mouthpieces are stored separately, and they get lost. Or people keep them to use with whatever insrument they've moved on to. 

 I had high hopes that my mouthpiece would fit the new-to-me horn as it was abou the same age as the old horn, but nope. The horn I have now has a very narrow receiver pipe and it accepts only a regular French horn mouthpiece, and it's particular even about that. So I eBayed off this old mouthpiece to offset the cost of buying a new one. 

 The person I sold it to was ungracious about the fact that the old mouthpiece wouldn't fit his particular old horn and he left me grumpy negative feedback on the auction. Whatever, Mr Crabapple. But maybe he'll trade this for another one that works better, or sell it for a profit. He probably won't keep it on a shelf near his desk, even if it doesn't fit any instrument he has, because he just likes it. 

 

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