Petrophonist Troxell

Professor Edward L. Troxell, who is Connecticut's State geologist and teaches geology at Hartford's Trinity College, last week proudly exhibited the latest results of a lifetime spent thinking about rocks: a xylophone made of stone. The idea came to him on a trip through Virginia's Shenandoah Caverns when his guide produced a beautiful, clanking tone by striking a stalactite across the middle.

Fired with enthusiasm, Professor Troxell started looking for resonant rocks, found an ideal deposit of them in a 200-million-year-old lava bed atop Avon Mountain near his home in Hertford. Toting a load of particularly clangorous cobbles home with him, Professor Troxell set them in a row, chipped them into tune with the aid of a chisel and a 10-c- pitch pipe. When he was through, he had a complete C Major scale three octaves long.

A stickler for scholarship, Professor Troxell realized he couldn't call his rocky instrument a xylophone (xylon is Greek for wood). After considering "lithophone" and "petroeuphonium," he decided to call it simply a petrophone.

No virtuoso, Petrophonist Troxell confines himself principally to scholarly renditions of such well-known compositions as Chopsticks, but occasionally rattles off a more ambitious classic. Says he: "People are impressed when I say I can play the Largo from Dvorak's New World Symphony, but, you know, that is really very simple."

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