Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motif

Though the stuff of legends, Dapper Clementine's infamous senior thesis Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motif (1965) 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

Rankling scholars from the get-go, Clementine convincingly read the crab canon B-D-G-D-B 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 (who in turn infected Grignotti's wife) -- a far cry from the tradition celebration of the creative collaboration and flourishing genius of these tangled three. 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 notable occasions.

In 1971, a letter entitled Horse Feathers (Dement, Clapper. Grignotes '77) declared that Buggeroni was a fraudulent artifice, invented by Clapper as backdrop for his scandalous take on Grignotti's personal affairs. “It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that wag ran,” sniffed the self-righteous Clapper. “Furthermore,” Clapper charged, “Clementine betrayed the public trust, taking advantage of his music-librarian position to create a cover story by altering purchasing and loan records in attempt to give credence to this imaginary composition.”

Dement details Dapper’s disinformation trail: dubious professors duped by evermore Buggeroni references embedded throughout area libraries; forged periodical citations; cleverly crafted card catalogue indices; critical appraisals slipped into various periodicals and newspapers of yore. The meticulous work Clapper credited to young Clementine is far too complex to fully catalogue here. “How could a young student fool so many experts?” Clapper moaned, bedazzled by sheer gall of the “wicked genius of this merry young counterfeiter, so determined to give historical weight to so many horse feathers.”

Astonishingly, Clementine never denounced these claims; indeed, many tabloids noted that he seemed to rather enjoy the attention of it all.

In 1999, the intrigue came to a head with the publication of Grignotti and the "Buggeroni" BDGDB Motive (Carrington and Periwinkle. Grignotes '99) which debunked Horse Feathers and brought attention to a recording of Buggerino, spectacularly rendered and Grignottian to the core.¹  Upending decades worth of accepted facts, this new research retrieved documents from impregnable repositories which established Buggeroni as an authentic Grignottian opera, composed in 1789 under its original title Buggerino. The authors of "The Motive" speculate that Clementine himself was behind the Horse Feathers,²  attempting to pass off his own 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.” -- Adkins, 2005.

Note 2:  In hindsight, it seems obvious that Clapper Dement and Dapper Clementine are one and the same -- but hindsight, as they say, is the product of the nether eye. Or something like that.

Desiderata

Dapper later published numerous scholarly works which, as a whole, present a rather unsettling fascination with the sexually bizarre.