The classical music world is not renowned for being particularly wacky, but it does have its fair share of zany moments and colourful characters, as Frances Farrer and Brian Levison discovered when they started digging around behind the scenes. The result is the recently-published Classical Music's Strangest Concerts and Characters, a collection of 85 extraordinary but true tales from concert halls and other venues around the globe.

With intriguing chapter headings such as The Conductor Who Beat Himself to Death, The Disappearing Orchestra and Caught With His Trousers Down, this book is a treasure trove of delights for any classical music fan. There is a tragic story about the 17th-century Master of the King's Music who accidentally stabbed himself to death while conducting, and the tale of 400 alarm clocks that went off during a concert in Chicago.

Brian said: "The book covers a very wide range, from the farcical to the serious. There's at least a couple of stories set in concentration camps, for example. But they're all short, compact stories; each story can be read in about five minutes, then you can put the book down, go away and pick it up another day."

Frances added: "There's a lot of Green Room tittle tattle, but it's also got gravitas."

Frances and Brian, who met through Writers in Oxford, complement one another perfectly. She is a professional journalist and author, with several published books already under her belt, and a plethora of useful contacts that she has built up over the years. She has also produced three arts festivals for children in the South Bank Concert Halls.

Brian is a retired businessman, who is now involved in running the East Oxford Farmers' Market, but has spent much of his spare time over the years writing poetry, and has penned the libretto for an oratorio. He is also a classical music enthusiast. "I've sung in choirs for over 10 years, and now sing with the East Oxford Community Choir. I don't play the piano or anything like that, but I've always gone to classical music concerts and always loved music."

So this book was very much a labour of love?

"It absolutely was. I enjoyed it very much. It was hard work, and the idea of starting with a requirement for 70,000 words and 85 stories was very daunting. But it was such fun, because the musicians I spoke to were such fantastically helpful, approachable and likeable people."

The idea for the book came from a friend of Brian's, Andrew Ward, who had already written a number of titles for the Strangest series. But it was a lunchtime meeting with Frances that gave him the nudge he needed to do something about it.

The book took about 18 months to research, with Brian scouring the libraries and Frances talking to her various contacts. She said: "I'm not a musician, but I've got a lot of friends who are, so I'm often around gossipy stories. I knew that I'd be able to get them and they'd be quite fun. And I thought it was a delightful, enjoyable and engrossing project."

One of her favourite stories is the one about the Barbican concert that went on for two days and consisted of the same sequence of slow-moving chords repeated 840 times. Then there was Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet, in which each member of the quartet had to play from a helicopter, with his performance transmitted to the audience via camera, television transmitter, three microphones and sound transmitters. The idea apparently came to the composer in a dream. She said: "I've had some pretty wacky dreams, but I've never had a grant to do one of them! But he did."

There is also a mention of Oxford musician Arne Richards, who runs the Oxford Concert Party. Brian said: "They have a contract to take music into prisons, so he has quite a few funny stories about what goes on in prisons." In fact, the story in the book relating to Arne Richards is quite moving, with one particularly dangerous inmate changing his whole attitude to life after taking part in a music project.

Some of these stories are funny, some are tragic, all of them are engaging and very strange indeed.

Inevitably, some stories didn't make it into the book, because certain facts couldn't be verified. "There was one man who wanted his skull left to the RSC so they could use it in Hamlet," said Frances. "I managed to track down the Wardrobe man, and he said they were always being left skulls but they couldn't use them because they smelt!"

Classical Music's Strangest Concerts and Characters is published by Robson Books, an imprint of Anova Books (www.anovabooks.com), at £6.99. Both authors are available to give talks; contact them on brian@levison.fslife.co.uk or francesfarrer@googlemail.com.