St. Remedius Medical College: "Mama's Got A Spell Box, Daddy Doesn't Sleep At Night"
A beginners primer on the St. Remedius music department
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Of all of the varying research departments at St. Remedius Medical College, the Music department brings up the most incredulity. Archaeology, Paleontology, Advanced Technologies, Botany, Physics and Metaphysics and Paraphysics…all of these make sense. Those students majoring in Music, though, get the usual comments from distant family members at holiday dinners. “Studying music? At St. Remedius? That’s like going to Caltech to study dance! Why not really throw your money away and go to Southern Methodist University for a journalism degree?” While well-meaning, these comments betray a fundamental understanding of the vital research conducted by St. Remedius, with extensive social benefits and occasional risks for all humanity.
Contrary to the assumption that it might be isolated from the various science departments within St. Remedius, the Music department works very closely with both Archeology and Exoarcheology in understanding prehuman and nonhuman musical instruments, both in restoring and testing recognized instruments and in attempting to understand the theories and concepts behind their use. It works with Linguistics both to translate and to understand metaphors, and with Advanced Technologies to hints about operation, applications to other similar items, and potential applications. Most importantly, the St. Remedius music department is a consistent and prolific contributor to the development of application licenses for non-academic uses, to the point where 31 percent of total license fees, financing research and operations across the planet and across the timeline, come directly from musical applications.
By way of example, the concept of Death Sculptures, artworks utilizing wood gathered with the utmost respect from cemeteries and used as a bridge between the living and the dead, is one assiduously chronicled and documented by metaphysical researchers at St. Remedius and elsewhere. What made St. Remedius unique was the expansion of that concept to other major cultural crossroads, especially those involving music. Because of extensive chronicling for 150 years and its proximity to the St. Remedius campus, the Deep Ellum district of Dallas became a prime testing ground starting in the mid-1980s, with its reputation for musical fame and notoriety, including the most justified beatdown in modern music history, giving an excellent baseline for the study of other sites. When a tree falls in Deep Ellum, no matter the species and no matter the cause, St. Remedius has automatic first access to the wood, and expanding upon Texas A&M’s groundbreaking research in wood treatment to recreate the Stradivarius sound in violins, St. Remedius fabrication shops produce some of the most powerful musical instruments in the world. A licensing agreement with the experts behind the Brianberger guitars of the early 1980s resulted in legendary guitars able to reach deep inside listeners’ psyches and unlock old memories and create new ones, all depending upon the talent and determination of the player.
(An obvious question asked about St. Remedius instruments: “if these have undue influence on listeners, could they be used for nefarious purposes?” This is a valid question, and handled by powerful medial and holoptronic enhancers in each instrument that strictly controls the mental message being relayed. A St. Remedius guitarist may make audiences laugh, cheer, cry, or bang their heads, but they cannot incite an audience to violence or other criminal activity by dint of playing alone. However, a subliminal “Tip your bartender, a lot, because it’s been a really rough week” or “anybody creeping on younger audience members might want to reconsider their life choices” is not only acceptable but encouraged.)
With the techniques developed with the Deep Ellum project, combined with other research within the Music department, St. Remedius is now the preferred educational institution for not merely understanding what music is and what it can do, but where it can go. This naturally led to rivalry and competition with other universities and colleges, particularly with the University of Texas at Austin, with its board determined to one-up St. Remedius by any means necessary. After nearly 30 years of experimentation, the end results led to catastrophe with a live demonstration of its instrument line in 2012, with the whole of the Palmer Event Center in downtown Austin and everyone in it vaporized in a contained explosion reaching the temperatures necessary for the nuclear fusion of iron. The surviving organizers were subsequently arrested, charged, and convicted, partly for the irresponsible release and use of metaphysical music without sufficient public protections, and partly for crimes against humanity for using the event to justify a reunion and revival of the 1990s band Marcy Playground. Either way, UT-Austin’s experiment proved to be a moral wound to its attempts to succeed at anything, and the university never tried again.
Essential Reading
Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky (University of Illinois Press, 2000)
Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution by Albert Glinsky (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded by Jason Heller (Melviille House, 2018)
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.