by Donald Greig
‘Sitcom, right? American? Doctors and nurses?’
‘Yeah, but set in the Korean war. Alan Alda was in it. You know Alan Alda, don’t you?’
Emma wasn’t entirely sure, but nodded. It was easier that way.
‘Anyway,’ continued Ollie, ‘Radar O’Reilly. Slept with a teddy bear. Short. Round glasses. Squeaky voice. He looks like that guy you were talking to. Who was he, by the way?’
‘He’s the musicologist I told you about. The one who’s got some project or other he wants to talk to me about after the concert? I’m not quite sure what it is he’s got in mind, but I’ll hear him out. He’s giving a paper in the same session as me, this afternoon.’
Ollie grunted. He and Allie felt that the contribution of music historians should be limited to providing clear editions in modern notation; anything more than that was an unjustified incursion into the performer’s private domain. A particular focus for their contempt was performance practice, the branch of music history that described the way in which the music was originally performed and which, on occasion, prescribed how modern performers should realise it today. For the basses, this was like being told how they should behave, a straitjacket of convention that interfered with their inalienable right to perform the music in whatever way they bloody well wanted. Emma could sympathise with that view. She wagered that the original performers claimed exactly the same kind of artistic licence, though her sympathy for Allie’s and Ollie’s position only went so far. Without academics, the basses wouldn’t have a job, their parts being played by various ‘bits of plumbing’, as they dismissively described all medieval instruments.
She hoped that Andrew Eiger would prove to be more sensitive than their awkward first meeting had suggested. He hadn’t acknowledged Ollie’s presence, and seemed physically and socially graceless, a parody of an academic in his blazer-and-tie outfit and his owlish glasses. Ollie would give him short shrift, as he did most intellectuals, an attitude stemming in part from jealousy. Whenever Paul’s name came up, as it sometimes did, Ollie stiffened. He felt her former lover had treated her badly and that she was over-generous in acknowledging his role in the genesis of the group. It was Ollie’s view that Beyond Compère had only really begun when it was a touring group and that the stage show was a completely different entity. Doubtless he had placed Andrew Eiger in the same category as those musicologists, including Paul, who deigned to criticise performers for exercising musical intuition.
Most of Ollie’s opinions were merely bluster. He was far from the cocksure man he appeared to some, and far more astute than he liked to let on. It was not a lack of A-levels that meant he hadn’t gone to university, opting instead for the vocationally oriented route of music college, but, thought Emma, a consequence of his upbringing. His father was in the Navy; he was a disciplinarian who would always put practice ahead of theory and, according to Ollie, was proud of the fact that he was tone-deaf. His mother, meanwhile, taught music in a local infants’ school, which meant there had always been a piano in the house and piles of printed music. It was as if Ollie had taken his cue from both of them; music college combined his mother’s love of music with his father’s pragmatism. Perhaps, at times, he resented the assumptions of others that he had missed out on something by not attending university, that somehow he hadn’t allowed his mind to expand either through listening to jazz and dabbling in drugs in a basement flat, or pondering the nature of the universe in a philosophy seminar. Whatever the reasons – and Emma was still slowly stripping away the defensive layers – a lot of his bluff exterior sprang from a benign, protective instinct that she found attractive. Only occasionally was he arrogant, and even then he was able to catch himself in the middle of some rambling tirade and laugh at himself. It was not calculated on his part, or at least rarely so, though knowing that his attacks were a form of shyness made it easier for Emma to indulge his occasional childishness. She knew he was sometimes incapable of stopping it, much as he might want to, and even while he displayed the most clichéd traits of the Alpha male – brawn and raw emotion – he appeared to her as a young boy, out of his depth and uncertain.
Their relationship was now three years’ old, and only last week they’d celebrated their anniversary. That was a rather grand term for what was, to all intents and purposes, a commemoration of the first time they had made love. Since then, they’d managed the transition from friends to lovers and negotiated the treacherous waters of an early relationship to the more settled realm of coupledom in full view of their colleagues. Peter, who always thought he had a special insight into people’s true feelings, particularly when he deduced homosexual inclinations in heterosexual men, asserted that the writing had been on the wall for some time, pointing out the number of times they had sat next to each other in restaurants and how, out of all the women in the group, Ollie had chosen Emma with whom to discuss his marital problems. Looking back, Emma was less sure. She and Ollie had not been particularly close during the runs in London and New York and there were times when she had even wondered if their relationship was a direct result of the touring life, a convenient office romance. But the opposite could also have been true, she reasoned: as a theatre director her role as objective commentator had been clearly defined, and perhaps it was that distance that blinded her to the possibility of finding love amongst those over whom she exerted authority. Nevertheless, there were times when she felt that Beyond Compère was as much the consequence of her backstage romances as her relationships were the by-products of the group’s well-documented history.
The plane had begun to rumble towards its take off point and the brakes gripped one final time before the pilot set the jets to full thrust and they were hurled down the runway. Ollie had already fallen asleep and Emma took out her papers and began to study them. It would be easier to work now than later on the bus, not least because then Ollie would be peering over her shoulder.
She was used to seeing her name in print, but it looked out of place here in the timetable of conference events. Where everyone else was identified in parentheses by their university, she was qualified by ‘Beyond Compère’ as if it were a place. The session at which she was speaking was entitled ‘Ockeghemian promotion and reception’, to be chaired by Daniel Huibert (Université de Nantes). Emma would speak first, followed by Andrew Eiger (Ohio State University) on the subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of Ockeghem’s work, something about which she had no knowledge and in which she had no real interest. Her image of Andrew was opaque, derived solely from their exchanges concerning the mooted project about which he was frustratingly vague. The brief meeting, with him hovering awkwardly in the aisle, had added nothing to her impression. In his correspondence he had hinted at new material, or at least she thought he had, but he was so guarded that it was sometimes difficult to work out exactly what he was saying. Still, she knew that some music departments in America had considerable private funding and, if it allowed her and the group to spend a few days in the Midwest working with students on interesting repertoire, then she was not going to turn down the offer. They’d talk about it later and, if it sounded promising, she would give the details to the British and American agents and let them sort it out.
The third speaker was Étienne Baraud (École Normale Supérieure), the title of his paper – ‘Ock’ j’aime; L’homme/le nom’ – as baffling as the brief précis that accompanied it. Such a summary was known in academic circles as an abstract, and Emma thought that the term was singularly appropriate here.
It wouldn’t be the first time that she had addressed an audience of musicologists. It would, however, be the first where the audience consisted of experts in such a specialised field and, were it not for the fact that many of them had helped her in the past, providing her with editions and advice, she would have found the prospect daunting. The thrust of her argument was simple: performers created their own images of composers, often based on little more than their experience of performing the music. This mystical
communion with a distant historical figure was, she argued, a necessary human identification and, imaginary though it may be, it was a corollary to convincing interpretation. How, though, did the performer react when the real historical facts collided with their expectations?
Her lecture was entitled ‘The Image of Ockeghem’ and began with the famous painted miniature of Ockeghem dated thirty years after his death. No one could even agree on which person in the picture was Ockeghem. Was it the old man with the hood and spectacles? Given that Ockeghem received a gift of rich, red cloth from Charles VII, maybe Ockeghem was the man in scarlet behind him, a younger man?
When researching the original stage production of Beyond Compère, she had read many accounts of fifteenth-century composers that had brought them to life as characters. Here they were, flesh and blood, having arguments with the church officials, climbing their way up the greasy pole of advancement, securing generous annual payments called benefices from churches they would never visit. Emma thought it important that the singers were as enthused as her and thus she had once told Allie of Francesco Florio’s report of Ockeghem written after a trip to Tours in the 1470s which had described the composer in hyperbolic terms: ‘so pleasing is the beauty of his person, so noteworthy the sobriety of his speech and of his morals and of his grace. He alone of all singers is free from all vice and abounds in all virtues.’ Allie’s response had been to dismiss Ockeghem as a goody-goody, forcing Emma hastily to reassure him that the report was literally too good to be true. According to other contemporary accounts, Ockeghem was a fine bass and almost certainly up for a drink after the gig; Dufay, the other great composer of the age, had purchased Burgundian wine when Ockeghem stayed with him in Cambrai in 1464. That kept Allie happy. She wanted her singers to like the composer whose music they would be performing extensively that year, and providing a positive image was an important aid to meaningful musical expression.
Her paper proposed a more philosophical argument about a shared psychological DNA between twentieth-century singers and fifteenth-century singer-composers, using stories of drinking and debauchery to underline more base common characteristics. To illustrate her point – and entertain her audience – she would alternate anecdotes of singers misbehaving in the Sistine Chapel and Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame in Paris and the Duomo in Florence, Cambrai Cathedral and El Escorial in Madrid, though without providing the dates. And then she would reveal to her listeners that they took place in 1456, 1987, 1478, 1995, 1476 and 1992. For all the differences in harmonic language and compositional approach, for all the alienating, convoluted codes of social behaviour, and for all the constricting literary and musical conventions, at the end of the day these composers were as human as their modern interpreters.
She would then turn to the issue of historical speculation. She had a few scores to settle with some musicologists who had demanded of her total historical accuracy, and she still smarted from a review that had criticised her for making Compère more famous than Josquin. It was undoubtedly true that Josquin was more celebrated, but it was a necessary narrative device, a matter of perspective – and here she would cite Stoppard making Hamlet a bit player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Of course the stage show was historically inaccurate: it was a fiction, not a documentary, and modern performance of ancient music was ineluctably condemned to conjecture until someone built a time machine. In Emma’s view, there was as much chance that she would be proved right in the future as proved wrong and, with the amount of research in archives and religious institutions in France going on these days, there was every chance that stranger truths might yet be revealed.
As she read through her paper she underlined certain words, much as she might mark up a musical score. On the first page she wrote in red ink a reminder to stand properly and breathe freely: ‘Lengthen spine!’ This would relax her and help make the most of her height of five feet and three-quarters of an inch. She provided indications of the shape of the sentences and the contours of her argument, the same kind of reminder that a singer might make in their copy to indicate the direction of a musical phrase. She then added a few pause markings so the structure of her argument might be clearer to the listener, and also to leave space for the laughter that she anticipated. Occasionally she also used the standard abbreviated musical markings – Accel and Rall – to remind her to speed up or slow down her delivery. After all, giving a lecture was a performance.
There was little more that she could do now. Trying to second-guess the questions her paper might provoke was futile, so she closed her folder.
‘A drink from the bar, madam?’
She asked for an orange juice and next to her Ollie struggled awake and ordered a coffee.
‘Did you get your stuff done?’ he asked.
‘Just about. Not much more I can do really. Did you sleep?’
‘A little. There’s always the bus.’
Ollie and Emma had become a couple on the very same day that, had things taken the slightest of turns, they might have separated forever. Every time Emma looked back, she did so with the unsettling sensation that remembering might of itself reverse the outcome and send her spinning back to a vertiginous moment which had threatened the very existence of the group. Allie had subsequently apologised for his behaviour, but Ollie and Emma never discussed the matter. In turn, none of the group mentioned it either, and it became the only narrative which, by its very seriousness, was too delicate to take a place in the group’s repertoire of shared reminiscence. Last year, on their second anniversary, Emma had felt the time had come to address history, but Ollie had urged her not to ‘go there’. He was, he said, not prepared to risk an argument, though he didn’t mind arguing about not arguing. Tempted as she was to make some comment about history repeating itself, Emma had surrendered to the more intimate purpose of the evening.
The roots of the crisis lay in the seemingly innocent issue of pronunciation. Emma felt that it was inconsistent to sing a French chanson with a French accent and then perform a Latin-texted motet by the same composer in an English accent, a view that she repeated in programme notes and interviews. Regional and historic variances were part of the same argument and, as a consequence, authentic pronunciation had become a further defining characteristic of Beyond Compère. To aid the singers, experts in the history of language provided phonetic transcriptions. Ironically though, modern scholars sometimes proved as unreliable as medieval scribes, which meant that questions about intention and execution arose regularly, disagreement staged between those who had some specialised knowledge and those who regarded the process as an annoying diversion to the real task of singing. In the arena of foreign languages it was Susan and Marco who had some claim to be consulted ahead of the others, and Allie and Ollie who were usually the object of any critique.
Things came to a head slowly. The group had been rehearsing for a concert the following week in Spain. That meant a day of rehearsals in a church in London, with the following day set aside for private study to memorise the music. Most of the repertoire was familiar and Emma had added a few new pieces, not simply because the resultant programme answered the specific brief of the Festival (‘Spain and France’), but also because it kept everyone on their toes and expanded their repertoire. Motets and chansons by De La Rue and Agricola would interleave others by Peñalosa and Escobar to demonstrate the many links that existed between the two countries around 1500.
Emma asked Susan to demonstrate the basic vowel and consonantal sounds of Spanish, and Allie and Ollie scribbled in their copies, parodying the examples out loud to make the other laugh. Emma ignored their sniggering and, after they’d sung through one piece, asked Susan to comment on what she’d heard.
‘The consonants were pretty good,’ she said. ‘People are stumbling on the “V”, though. It should be a soft “B”.’
‘As in “Bagina”,’ observed Allie. Childish as it was, it made everyone laugh – even Susan who blushed through her make-up. Ollie, to signal his disd
ain for the whole exercise, laughed more than anyone else. Emma had learned that it was best to allow the basses to let off steam about such issues rather than chide them and, whatever Allie’s intentions, it lightened the tension and the group worked contentedly till the mid-morning break.
Shortly after the rehearsal resumed, Emma felt that they were all slipping back into English pronunciation and asked Susan and Marco for their opinion. Marco, who preferred Italian vowels even when singing in English, didn’t seem too concerned, but Susan went straight for it. ‘It’s the aah sound. That’s typically English and it doesn’t exist in Spanish. You should be singing ah, like in “hat”, not aah as in “heart”.’
She looked across at Ollie and Allie, as if they were the only culprits, and added, ‘It’s Allie, not Arlie.’
Emma tried to say something – anything – to break the sharp silence and prevent the response which she feared was coming, but Allie was too quick. ‘So I should call you an ass and not an arse then?’ he asked with mock innocence. If Susan had blinked, a tear would have rolled from her eye. Emma intervened quickly, announcing that they’d sing the final section one more time before the lunch-break.
Things settled down in the afternoon. Allie had apologised to Susan at lunchtime and everyone’s false cheer promised a less eventful session. The basses worked harder on their vowels and Allie even asked Susan how to pronounce the words of a villancico they were learning.
‘Billancico,’ corrected Susan with an embarrassed smile.
The problem came when they rehearsed a piece they had already sung many times in previous concerts. Because the concert was recreating a performance at the Spanish court, the singers had to ignore the familiar sounds of French that they’d already learned and instead apply Spanish pronunciation. For Allie and Ollie this was going a step too far, putting the cart before the horse in privileging pedantry over performance. They blustered and argued, but Emma stood firm: it wouldn’t be as difficult as they thought. They bridled at her attempt at reassurance; she could tell that they thought they were being patronised and, if they were going to be treated as children, they would act like them too. They sang the next run-through of the piece in a cheap imitation of a Mexican bandito, a bright nasal sound with trilled ‘r’s’, and succeeded in making each other laugh so much that they didn’t notice how uncomfortable everyone else was.