It isn't the instruments that makes Fielding's House of Mystery Instruments so scary. It is that as soon as you arrive, weird musical creatures somehow materialize in your arms. I have this sort of image. You walk up to the house, and press the doorbell. Rick comes out and says: "Isn't that an amazing sound! Did you know that a doorbell very like this one was used in Bill Monroe's early gospel song: "If You Ring The Doorbell, Jesus Will Answer!" Here, play this doorbell in 6/8 while I get out the mandolin." Or, on another day, you stroll up, and he is cutting the lawn with a Weed Whacker. "Hey!" he says, "Have you ever noticed that a Weed Whacker is a Bb when it is cutting grass, and an A when it is cutting weeds? If you hold this, I will get the lawnmower -- which is in low D -- and we will do Malvina Reynolds' "God Bless the Grass"!" And so on. And this is before you get in the door.
Once inside, anything can, and usually does happen. If you blink, there is a bassoonet in your hands. How did it get there? What has possessed him to think I can play the hybrid electric autoharp, the plastic saxophonedobro, the harmonicandleabra? And then it really starts: "You know," he says, "I saw a really nice one of these in the Carpathian instrument/laundromat store yesterday. It would only take you a few days to get really good on it, if you gave up everything else and went to Carpathia of course. But it is possible." And so, somehow, without knowing it, you find yourself on a coach, driven by bats, approaching a dank castle in the Carpathian forest, about to devote your life to the vamplified theorbo.... ANOTHER VICTIM OF THE FIELDING HOUSE OF MYSTERY INSTRUMENTS!!!! BE WARNED!!!!

yours, Peter T.