Time Will Tell

by Donald Greig

  ‘I really need to get some sleep,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Don’t know. Allie’s got an idea.’

  ‘That sounds dangerous.’

  Allie’s ‘ideas’ generally involved alcohol, usually to excess. There was no such thing as a quick drink, unless it was a quick drink followed by another quick drink. And another.

  Ollie smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t let you down. Shall I ring you and let you know where we are?’

  ‘No. I’ll be fine. You go off and I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Ollie kissed her briefly on the lips and scurried after Allie, who had already changed and was making his way to the exit.

  In her dressing room, Emma placed the flowers in the sink. They were too cumbersome to carry to Tours tomorrow and she would leave them here for the cleaner. In the meantime at least they added some colour and life to the featureless room. The usual venues for the group were churches or cathedrals where they would all change in the same room, and she missed the camaraderie. Down the hall the onstage incidents and accidents were having their first tentative outings, one-liners punctuating conversations fuelled by residual adrenalin. She liked being there when the stories began to form, like crystals created in experiments at school with a string hanging in a solution of blue liquid. At least tomorrow, with the concert in the Cathedral of St Gatien, they would all be together, an event that Emma had looked forward to since the concert had first been suggested by the conference organiser. Despite her interest in Ockeghem and his circle, she’d never been to Tours. The past three years had been hectic, and Ollie’s idea of a holiday was not a cultural visit to the birthplace of the music they sang. Even though St Martin, the church of which Ockeghem was Treasurer and at which he’d sung, no longer existed, she looked forward to being in the city, to soaking up something of its atmosphere and letting her imagination wander.

  A leather-bound book lay on the coffee table: the concert hall’s guest book. It was open at the page she was expected to sign, the details of the concert penned in cursive italics: “Ockeghem and his Contemporaries” by Beyond Compère directed by Emma Mitchell. She could never resist looking at the earlier entries, names of famous conductors and groups in whose company she felt like a naïve but enthusiastic student once more. Flicking through the pages she came across the names of Simon Rattle, The Pat Metheny Group, The Kings’ Singers, each with a non-committal, bland yet polite message which made her feel less fraudulent about her own contribution: ‘A wonderful hall with beautiful acoustics, matched by a beautiful audience and a warm welcome.’

  As her pen scratched on the paper she was struck by the silence, incongruous after eighty minutes of intense music. She removed her all-black concert clothes and slipped into jeans and sweatshirt, then turned up the loudspeaker in the hope of hearing the sounds of the audience making their way out of the hall, but the auditorium was quiet, as if the concert itself had never happened. She looked in the mirror and flicked back her short hair. Her stage make-up had smoothed away any expression of concern or relief and exaggerated the darkness of her eyes. It was a suitable mask for her final public performance of the evening, that of meeting the audience at the stage door. One final effort, and then her time would be her own once more.

  ‘Ubera et dentes,’ she said: cod Latin for ‘tits and teeth’.

  CHAPTER 3

  Thinking about fifteenth-century music these days produced in Andrew an almost uncontrollable urge to re-acquaint himself with his find. He checked once again that Earl was still safely asleep, slid the blue plastic folder from beneath his lecture notes and gently withdrew its contents. Here it was: his Holy Grail, his Ark of the Covenant, but indisputably real. Academic disciplines usually proceeded slowly and carefully, yet this discovery would immediately redraw the musical map.

  It was potentially the biggest early music discovery of the past fifty years: a thirty-four-part, anonymous motet written over a hundred and fifty years before Striggio’s missing forty-part Mass or Tallis’ equally grand Spem in alium. It was the obvious inspiration for the twenty-four-voice Qui habitat attributed to Josquin and the thirty-six-part Deo Gratias that had been assigned mistakenly to Ockeghem. The text was from Psalm Fifty-one – Psalm Fifty as Ockeghem would have known it from the Latin Vulgate Bible – Miserere mei, a text for Ash Wednesday. But something on this scale had to have been written for a very special occasion. Identifying the exact circumstances of its first performance would help him to determine who had written it; there was no attribution on the manuscript, nor was there any reference to it in any fifteenth-century source. All he knew for certain was that it was related in some way to Tours, France’s capital in the fifteenth century, even though he had found the manuscript in Amiens. That much he had established from the accompanying letter written by Geoffroy Chiron, who was a chambrier at St Martin in Tours, the same abbey at which Ockeghem had been treasurer and singer.

  The motet could have been written by any of the composers who were linked with the royal chapel – Antoine Busnois, Loyset Compère, or even a lesser composer like Jehan Fresnau. It could even be by Josquin, though he really hoped it wasn’t; as the musical equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, Josquin’s reputation needed no help at all. What Andrew really wanted was for it to have been written by Ockeghem, the figurative godfather to the younger generation of Josquin, Compère, De La Rue and countless other composers. And it definitely bore some Ockeghemian trademarks, though any of those could have been the result of influence or deliberate hommage. Such hope arose not merely from a despairing idealisation of the composer whom he loved above all others, but also from a rather more base inclination: the more important the composer, the greater the reflected glory. If he could prove it was by Ockeghem, Andrew’s own success would be assured.

  The manuscript never failed to raise his spirits. It was not the original, of course. That lay in the place he had found it, as the padding in the spine of the chapter records in the church library in Amiens Cathedral, where it had remained hidden from the world for five hundred years. He would have loved to have taken it, but provenance would have to be shown; it needed to stay where it had come to rest by a twist of fate, the details of which might never come to light.

  Looking at the music now, Andrew was in a state of rapture, oblivious to the rude noises of Earl’s snoring and the roar of the engines, as free of earthbound concerns as the plane that rose effortlessly through the mantle of cloud into a naked sky.

  The copy in his blue folder was his latest transcription. He’d worked on it for five months, expanding it from three discrete parts to its thirty-four voices by following the instructions given in Latin. They told him that that each part was a canon whereby one part repeated the same line at a fixed rhythmic interval, a musical device understood by every child who has sung Frère Jacques and London’s Burning. Just as such simple rounds can produce an infinite number of parts, so the three statements were designed to yield thirty-four parts: nine discantus and nine contratenor lines; eight each of bassus and tenor. The original singers would have been able to render their vocal part from the single iteration that appeared in the original manuscript, their part isolated from the others like a modern orchestra; modern singers, though, would expect the immediate visual geography of a score format which detailed the resultant parts, and it was this that Andrew would present to Emma Mitchell and her group.

  Even with no modern edition, the manuscript was a valuable and exploitable historical artefact. His current thinking was concurrent articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Early Music, and a shorter presentation in The Musical Times, together with a series of lectures at key institutions that he’d earmarked with a view to job placements. With Karen wanting to be closer to her mother in Florida and Andrew wanting to be closer to Europe, which he thought of as his cultural home, he’d already ruled out Stanford and Berkeley on the West Coast. Yale, Harvard and Princeton were top of his list, and Colu
mbia and Duke would do at a pinch.

  There was no doubting, though, that performances of the composition would enhance its reputation. Over the past thirty years, performers had brought fifteenth-century music into the musical mainstream on the concert stage and recordings. The music of Josquin and others was now regularly performed, a situation that would have left the original composers’ heads spinning, and Andrew intended to reach the largest possible audience. In order to do that he needed a group with an understanding of concert-giving, recording and imaginative programming, which was where Emma Mitchell and Beyond Compère came in. He had their recordings and used them in class. Everyone did. For one thing they were well-researched, well-presented, and brilliantly performed, but they also appealed to the younger audience. The early-music audience of the 1970s had grown old, but Beyond Compère had reached a new demographic and he wanted to tap into it. It was the final part of his plan.

  But there was a problem, and it was a serious one: he couldn’t get the parts to fit. However hard he tried, however many assumptions he made about copying errors, he could not get the four voices, let alone thirty-four, to sound anything other than simply wrong. Harmonies that could never have existed in the fifteenth century sprang from the page directly into his mind’s eye revealing parallel fifths and octaves: simple contrapuntal errors that even a choirboy wouldn’t have made. Cadences were displaced by one or two notes so that the expected resolution lagged behind in one part, or two parts leapt forward to arrive ahead of the others. The results were like the gridlock produced when traffic lights failed and cars piled around each other, with honking horns: chaos where there should have been order.

  He’d tried everything. He could have sought advice, written to more senior colleagues – any of them, generous with their time and undoubtedly excited by his extraordinary revelation, would have helped him. Once they’d picked themselves up off the floor, that is. And therein lay Andrew’s dilemma: he needed help because he couldn’t work it out for himself, but ambition required that he keep it a secret. A discovery as big as this was his meal-ticket out of the Midwest, his free Round-the-World trip to every major university. There he would be feted and celebrated after delivering the same, well-worn lecture. It was his entrée into the Ivy League that had excluded him for so long, and he didn’t want to blow it by having the news leak out. Much as he trusted these respected colleagues, he knew their adherence to the unwritten academic code of sharing knowledge and research.

  So, working on his own, he’d made countless attempts at reconstructing the parts, the results of which, once they’d proven themselves unfit for purpose, he destroyed. Given the number of unsuccessful attempts, it was amazing the shredder still worked. He still hadn’t solved the notational riddle and all he had to offer Emma Mitchell and her group was this: one of two un-performable editions.

  Application and hypothesis had failed; maybe intuition was the way forward? Which is why he stared at the familiar fifteenth-century square shapes, trying to clear his mind and let the key to the puzzle come to him, waiting for inspiration to strike. He knew the music backwards as well as forwards, for he’d even tried notating it in reverse. That wasn’t entirely an act of desperation; puns, acrostics, riddles, mazes and anagrams were frequent devices in the music and art of the period, and there was always the chance that the anonymous composer had employed a Leonardo-like cipher of mirror-writing. Perhaps the parts needed to go forwards and backwards, like the tenor parts in the Agnus Dei from Josquin’s Missa L’Homme Armé Super voces musicales – but that didn’t work either. Nothing did. So here he was, once more staring vacantly at the notation, hoping it would somehow expose itself through an act of veneration.

  ‘Any good tunes?’

  He jumped and instinctively covered the manuscript with his hands. Earl was awake and looking over his shoulder. Andrew’s immediate thought was to put the music away. But that might draw attention to its importance and, in any event, he doubted very much that Earl, brass player that he was, could read fifteenth-century notation.

  ‘Er, well, not tunes exactly. Fifteenth-century polyphony. “Lines” might be a better term.’ He looked down and saw that the discantus part was clearly visible.

  ‘Any good lines, then?’ asked Earl, smiling slightly, and he started humming, a high, not unpleasant sound.

  ‘Er, it’s a C clef,’ said Andrew, noticing a semitone where he should have sung a tone. ‘It’s not a bass clef, which is an F clef. So, you see this – ’ Andrew pointed at the C clef at the beginning of the stave. ‘That means this note is a C –’ he traced the line with his finger along the stave – ‘so this note –’ he pointed to the one below it – ‘is a B natural.’

  Too late he realised he should have kept his mouth shut for, by dropping into teaching mode, he’d inadvertently encouraged Earl.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ said Earl casually, as if he’d been reminded of something he knew, and he started humming again.

  Andrew was impressed. For one thing, the square notation didn’t slow Earl down at all and he sang all the correct pitches. It was only the values that didn’t work. Where, according to the laws of fifteenth-century notation, he should have altered the consecutive breves – so one was worth three beats and the following one only two – Earl had accorded both notes equal value. Andrew saw his way out: he’d point out the difficulty of reading this music and put him off.

  ‘But, er, unfortunately, you’re not altering the note values. This notation works differently; the notes aren’t the value that they seem to have on the page. They alter according to the mensuration sign and the context –’ blind him with science, he thought – ‘so the same note can mean two different things. This breve here is worth three beats and this one here is worth only two.’

  ‘That’s a bit stupid, isn’t it?’ said Earl.

  Brass players, thought Andrew. Always literal.

  ‘I used to play some early stuff – Gabrieli and guys like that – on the sackbut.’

  The sackbut, an antecedent of the trombone, was a sixteenth-century instrument, and this explained why Earl had some experience in the world of early music, and why he was unfazed by the square notes.

  ‘You guys think too much. I think it should go like this.’ Earl started to sing the notes according to modern notational rules.

  It wasn’t a bad sound that he made, thought Andrew, even if what he was singing was clearly wrong. Someone across the aisle stared at them and Andrew mouthed an apology.

  ‘I think we’re disturbing the other passengers,’ he said.

  ‘No class, eh?’ Earl jabbed Andrew in the side with his elbow. ‘I guess we’d better leave ‘em in peace.’ He leaned forward to retrieve the in-flight magazine and started flicking through it.

  Despite the fact that it would have been historically impossible, Andrew was almost inclined to accept the sweating salesman’s literal solution to the notational conundrum. For one thing, the resultant melody had balance and flow, and it sounded more convincing than any of Andrew’s solutions. But it was absurd. How could a fat salesman from the Midwest have cracked the code when Andrew, with all his experience, had been so confounded?

  He dismissed the thought and closed his eyes, as much as anything to indicate to Earl that the conversation was over. And now, as he had done so many times, he surrendered to a fantasy of a future in which his reputation was secure, a pristine world in which work and pleasure were inextricably entwined.

  ‘And how did you come to discover the key to the puzzle?’ asked the interviewer.

  ‘Well,’ he would say, turning to Camera Two with accustomed ease, ‘for the benefit of the viewers I should just explain that pieces written at this time used a different system. I tried writing it out according to the rules that applied at the time, but it didn’t work. Then I tried several variations. Composers of the time loved puzzles – anagrams, acrostics, hidden messages – like cryptic crosswords really – so I tried a few different approaches. None worked. But then I
thought…’

  The daydream collapsed as quickly as it had formed, the solution still out of reach.

  All he had to do was crack the notational riddle and prove the authorship of the motet and then … then he wouldn’t have to suffer this kind of physical inconvenience. He’d have a big chair, in First Class, and the stewardesses would attend to his every need rather than treat him with the kind of sour contempt he’d suffered on this flight. In fact, he’d probably never travel in Coach again.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  At the stage door Emma was beset by a small clutch of eager concertgoers and obsessive fans. Peter, Susan and Claire were already patiently answering questions and offering appropriate encouragement. The tenors and basses were long gone, probably well into their second pint.

  A man in his mid-fifties with a moustache like an overused toothbrush pushed towards her.

  ‘Miss Mitchell,’ he breathed, his voice tight, ‘I have all your CDs. Could you sign them for me?’

  She smiled. ‘Of course.’

  Here they all were, in chronological order. The first, Beyond Compère by Beyond Compère, the live recording of their first and only theatrical production, followed by the more refined but, to her mind, rather restrained and too-perfect studio version, issued on EMI. Then came the later releases: Dufay Defined and Josquin Can, jokey titles that belied the essential seriousness of the projects, but which helped in the current climate of falling CD sales and the dumbing-down of classical music. Both were adorned with stickers proclaiming the prizes that they had won – Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason D’Or. If all else failed, thought Emma, they were sure of a welcome in France.