Music Room Portraits

Turbo Granny labels them thought forms rather than plain ghosts. The Music Room Portraits arise from the framed images of musicians hung in the Kami High music room, sustained by the constant fear students direct at those pictures, and they sit among the well-known Seven School Mysteries passed down in Japanese schools. One firm rule triggers them: someone has to bang out a clumsy tune on the music room piano in the dead of night, right at 2 a.m., and only then do the paintings come alive and rush to slay the player. Inside the manga they take a small villain part across the Evil Eye Arc.

Their backstory echoes the Beethoven Portrait Mystery, where the painted composers on a music room wall stir after dark, eyes flaring red, stares trailing visitors, faces changing when nobody looks, and the empty pianos ringing out on their own to foretell coming misfortune. The real-world notion of the tulpa, a materialized being from Tibetan Buddhism later picked up by Theosophy, underlies the whole concept.

The portraits emerge after Turbo Granny botches the music room piano on purpose, then dumps the blame on Okarun and Aira to cast them as practice opponents for Okarun's drills. Launching Symphony No. 6, the spirits start with a barrage of bursting musical notes that tear up the illusory arena and trap Aira so they can hammer her with blasts. Okarun darts in to drag her free, and the moment he catches the beat they can no longer land a hit on him. With his backing Aira gets close and fells their conductor, dropping it back into a lifeless painting. Robbed of the conductor, the rest lose the power of flight and reply with Symphony No. 9, summoning a throng of opera-goers to mob the duo. While Aira fends off the crowd, Okarun erases the remaining portraits in a single pass, and afterward the group heads back to the music room. The anime tweaks the rules, allowing the portraits to keep floating even once the conductor is gone.

The lineup holds six named portraits, each based on a real composer or conductor. Ninth serves as the conductor, a speed fanatic who barks at the others to play faster. Vanben, the Ludwig van Beethoven stand-in, runs hot-tempered and despises the crude racket that summons them, bent on crushing whoever caused it, an irony next to the deaf composer he mirrors. Grandma Bach, taken from Johann Sebastian Bach, is full of himself and snaps whenever Glasses brings up his father. Trainspotter, the Antonin Dvorak figure, loves trains and apes an approaching locomotive while playing. Mozza, modeled on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, traffics in crude jokes, and Glasses, the Franz Schubert counterpart, nurses a fixation on his father.