Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motif

Though the stuff of legends, Dapper Clementine's infamous senior thesis "Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motif" is, quite frankly, somewhat dry and pedantic. Therefore, rather than bore the reader with a wholesale reprint of the text, we have provided a brief summary and history of the piece in the Extrapolation below. For those who wish to so subject themselves, a portion of the text may be found under the Extrapolation of Crab Canon.

Extrapolation

In 1965 this groundbreaking work was published. Rankling scholars from the get-go, Clementine's work convincingly read the B-D-G-D-B crab-canon sequence of Paolo Grignotti's "Buggeroni" (1789) as a reference to the ‘‘B’’iberoni, ‘‘D’’iamanta, ‘‘G’’rignotti love triangle. Not only did Clementine offer a new reading of the music (which Clementine bemoaned as a "lost Grignotti classic"), he offered a new reading of Grignotti's private affairs, challenging conventional wisdom by presenting a murderously jealous Grignotti who staged his own disappearance after purposely infecting Biberoni with syphilis. Biberoni, in turn, infected Grignotti's wife Diamanta. Curiously, Clementine failed to even register the similarity between the title of the music (Buggeroni) and its presumed antagonist (Biberoni), though this has since become the butt of numerous ribald British puns.

Since its original publication, Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motif has re-rankled the scholarly community on at least two noteable occasions.

In 1971, a letter entitled Simply Horse Shit (Dement, Clapper. Grignotes '77) declared "Buggeroni" to be a fraudulant artifice invented by Clementine simply to provide a backdrop for his scandalous reading of Grignotti's personal affairs. Furthermore, Clapper claimed that Clementine took advantage of his position in the music-library to create a cover story by creating a few purchasing and loan records for this imaginary composition. Clementine managed to stay one step of investigative professors, embedding more and more references to “Buggeroni” in various libraries, forging periodical citations, crafting new indices in card catalogues, and, eventually, slipping critical appraisals of “Buggeroni” into various periodicals and newspapers of yore. The meticulous work Clapper credited to young Clementine is far too complex to fully detail here. That a young student could have fooled so many experts was presented as a testament to the wicked genius of this merry young counterfeiter.

Astonishingly, Clementine never denounced this essay; indeed, many tabloids noted that he seemed to rather enjoy the attention it brought him.

In 1999, the shit hit the fan with the publication of Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motive (Carrington and Periwinkle, Grignotes '99). This essay debunked Horse Shit and its authors brought forward a recording of “Buggerino”, spectacularly rendered and Grinottian to the core.¹  Upending decades worth of accepted facts, this new research retrieved documents from impregnable repositories which established Buggeroni as a real piece (originally entitled "Buggerino") composed by Grignotti in 1789. The authors of "The Motive" speculate that Clementine himself was behind the Horse Shit² , attempting to pass off his work as a hoax in order to somehow hinder efforts by readers to use his information to decode messages encrypted in this and other operas directed towards La Ligue du Masque Cancéreux.

Notes

Note 1:  The recording is of easily verifiable origin as the jacket itself is legitimate. The recording was made in 1977 by the Plüntz Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Josef Liebenfeld.

Note 2:  In hindsight, it seems obvious that Clapper Dement and Dapper Clementine are one and the same – but hindsight, as they say, is like opinions: everybody’s got one.

Desiderata