Well this has to rank among some of the weirder items of mail I've ever received. They arrived in a brown manila envelope decorated with stickers. Addressed to my business but not to me by name. No return address. Postmark is Cleveland, Ohio. Inside, no letter or explanation, just three snippets of handwritten music in both blue and red ink titled "LORD JEFFREY M. HARRIS CHRISTMASS (sic) MASS CONCERTO", "LORD JEFFREY M. HARRIS CONCERTO RIGHT", and "QUEEN KAREN JAZZ WORLD JAZZ" in all caps.

It must be said that these titles make no sense, either musically or linguistically. At first I thought maybe a child had written them and for some reason decided to mail them to me. Maybe an old student?? But the more I look at them the handwriting, though sloppy, does not look like the handwriting of a child. Moreover, I have no idea what this person expects me to do with these. They're little more than undeveloped motifs (NOT two concertos and a "jazz world jazz" whatever that is). And I haven't one clue who Lord Jeffrey M. Harris is, or why he would require even a single concerto let alone two. I'm not even sure if these are meant to be played by piano, since the music only contains a single clef. So many mysteries!

If this is you and you recognize your handiwork, please pipe up in the comments and explain yourself! I have no idea what was intended by this little gift.

Some folks have been asking what they sound like, and do they sound 'good' and the short answer is they don't really sound like anything. It's a bit hard to describe. Imagine you're baking a cake and you have all the ingredients set out on the counter but you haven't mixed any of them yet. It doesn't make sense to ask whether the cake "tastes good". There isn't any cake yet. All there is so far is flour, butter, eggs, and milk.

I'm going to upload these for posterity so folks who don't read music or play an instrument can understand what these sound like.

Here is "Lord Jeffrey M. Harris Concerto Right"

https://youtu.be/tsSFequPG6s?si=3tayWiyuXRtwjAWA

"Lord Jeffrey M. Harris Concerto Right" by Anonymous Cleveland Mailer

YouTube

Here is "Lord Jeffrey M Harris Christmass Mass Concerto"

https://youtu.be/Mcat56kw4uA?si=LcMEo-7a6UBJzAx8

"Lord Jeffrey M. Harris Christmass Mass Concerto" by Anonymous Cleveland Mailer

YouTube

And here is "Queen Karen Jazz World Jazz"

https://youtu.be/36cFiOB_Qew?si=GkRbskgFrcrAR-Oy

"Queen Karen Jazz World Jazz" by Anonymous Cleveland Mailer

YouTube

And finally, here is a rather generous interpretation and arrangement of "Queen Karen Jazz World Jazz", along with a short kind of explanation for why this is musically so strange.

You have to understand - whoever this person is, THEY DIDN'T WRITE THIS. I wrote this. The same way the chicken didn't bake a cake, it just supplied the eggs, which were one of *several* raw ingredients.

https://youtu.be/Ru8BgaxyDeo?si=_7Abd9p9u59QAziA

"Queen Karen Jazz World Jazz" by Anonymous Cleveland Mailer arranged for Piano by Lana Gaudio

YouTube
@Lana That is lovely. Perhaps this is why you were chosen: to bring forth the music in that personโ€™s head.

@Lana

Not gonna lie, after listening to all three, I pictured you as a mystery protagonist:

Lana never expected an innocent unmarked envelope to alter her life so dramatically. The three strangely titled music sheets she finds unleashes the fragments unending distorted sounds that haunts her steps and frays her sanity. Who sent it and why? If she wishes to survive she must solve the mystery or be swallowed by the yawning vortex of Lord Jeffrey M. Harris and Queen Karen.

@Lana sorry, but that's awesome ๐Ÿ˜‚
@constantorbit I mean yeah it kind of is. I just wish I had more answers than questions!
@Lana things get weird in Cleveland!
@mazigazi I googled both "Lord Jeffrey M Harris" (no results) and "Queen Karen" and apparently Queen Karen is a SpongeBob SquarePants character?? The mystery deepens.
@Lana I had an old housemate who became schizophrenic send me something like that (but artwork) 10 years after I lost touch with her. I don't know how she got my address, either. I only knew who it was because of the handwriting.
@paulrosen yeah I mean I didn't want to bring it up but I guess one rather obvious answer here is mental illness.

@Lana

Where is Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

@Lana @constantorbit This is pretty wild. I did some searching and came across this reddit thread. Seems like folks have been receiving these for a few years now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/ksinqe/update_mysterious_letters_sent_from_cleveland/

@Lana I used to receive cards from an older lady who was angry at us for some unknown reason. It ended up being a person in memory care. Apparently she used to live in that house.

@Lana if musical notes are representations of numbers or letters, is it a hidden message of some kind?

#encoding #encryption #steganography #musicencoding

@dashrb it definitely isn't. The longest two words you can make that way are Cabbage and Baggage so unless the secret message is specifically "I have a cabbage in my baggage", musical notes are an extremely poor method of encryption.

@Lana I donโ€™t dispute that, and the screenshots look pretty short.

The notes could be a two-notes-makes-one-letter, (or 3 notes) like #BCD (Binary coded decimal) or similar.

Obviously Iโ€™m grasping at straws; just trying to think outside the box!

@Lana Quest? Quest.
@jelte OMG you're right I just received a real life Bethesda quest