Time Will Tell (4 page)

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.

‘And when will your next disc be coming out, Miss Mitchell?' asked the unctuous man, beads of sweat popping on his bald head.

Emma bit her tongue. What she really wanted to do was challenge him for calling her
Miss
Mitchell. There was a condescending edge to the sycophancy and she resented being adored and patronised simultaneously. This wasn't a question of the fan lusting after her (she batted away the thought), but of regarding her with awe mixed with, well, disbelief: there were still some for whom the term ‘female conductor' was an oxymoron.

She knew that sometimes she overreacted, that what she took for over-solicitousness was genuine concern, but the press in particular tended to focus on her gender rather than her relative youth: one rather pompous review in
The Times
had put the word ‘conductor' in inverted commas, as if her role within the group didn't even qualify her for the title; and a small-scale publication for early music enthusiasts, from which she had expected a modicum of parochial sympathy, had once glided too swiftly from an observation on her gender to a criticism of her interpretation, thereby hinting that the two were interrelated. She had, in any case, given up even using the term ‘conductor' and latched onto the idea of the
animateur
, a term that referenced her drama background and described her role far more accurately as the person who prepared, commented upon, interpreted and shaped the performances which she herself would introduce and present.

The fan was standing there, his wet mouth hanging open with anticipation, eager to hear the news about the next CD despite the fact that, with all the pre-publicity, he probably knew all about it anyway.

‘Well, the next CD will be out very soon. It's Ockeghem year, as you know, and it'll be called
Ockeghem Gems
. Available in all good record stores,' she said. Her little joke was acknowledged with a keening laugh, which came just a little too early and a little bit too loudly. Her teeth on edge, she signed the accompanying booklet, then excused herself and moved over to two young students who were obviously eager to speak to her.

‘Could you sign this for us?' asked one of them, tall, with glasses, the geeky type. Rather than a CD it was a score of
Nymphes des bois
that he proffered, a hand-written edition that he'd obviously made himself. In the top right-hand corner he'd written his name and the occasion for which he'd prepared the edition.

‘Your own edition, I see?' said Emma. ‘And for a concert you're giving tomorrow?'

He giggled slightly, a nervous sound. To announce his presence, his better-looking and clearly more-self-confident friend answered.

‘Yeah. Gig at the University. A celebration of Ockeghem on his death-day,' he said. ‘I'm Steven and this is Simon. I'm the conductor and he's the brains.'

‘The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.' Emma realised she'd responded automatically, and she blamed her tetchy correction on her previous encounter with the oleaginous fan. She could see from the looks on the students' faces that they thought she had taken offence, so she quickly added, ‘Conductor and musicologist? It's a winning combination.'

She signed the score and, to break the awkward silence, expanded on her observation: early music, more than any other field of music, was built on the kind of partnerships of which Steven and Simon were an example. She herself relied a great deal on musicologists who specialised in fifteenth-century music: they were the experts who provided the group with transcriptions of the original manuscripts in modern notation, whilst her own research provided the social and historical background.

‘The musicologists give us the black and white sketch, and we conductors just colour it in,' she said, repeating a line she'd used recently in a radio interview. The students beamed their understanding and told her proudly of the name of the group –
JDP
– from Josquin's initials. She reciprocated by telling them how the name of Beyond Compère had been a jokey, provisional name that had eventually stuck.

She much preferred talking like this than receiving empty adulation, but sometimes it was difficult to steer the right course between encouragement and advice. She spared Simon and Steven the stuff that increasingly took up her time: the contracts with promoters and record companies; the promotion of the group; the fund-raising; the Trustees' meetings; the finances. It made her tired just thinking about it all, and she knew that however much she warned them about the vicissitudes of touring – the lack of sleep, the late nights and early starts, the busy airports, the crummy hotel rooms, the exhausting repetition of it all – they would still come away with a false image of international glamour.

Her rise had been as rapid as it was unplanned and it had begun in theatre, quite different to the more obvious routes of singing and teaching that these two students were following. There was only so much advice she could offer, therefore, for her own progress towards the recognition she now enjoyed was so quirky and unintentional, so laden with good luck and serendipity, that there was no clear path for her to extrapolate that would in turn guide them to equivalent success.

Encouraging them to keep in touch, she gave them the contact details of her agent and walked back to the hotel past Newcastle's pubs and clubs accompanied by the occasional thud of a bass-line from an unrecognisable pop song. She would have liked Ollie to be there, and not just to provide a reassuring protection from imagined threats of late-night high spirits. As director of the group she spent her days switching between assumed roles – fairy godmother to some, wicked witch to others – a parade of conflicting identities that exhausted her and prompted a vague, enduring sense of doubt. When she admitted her worries to Ollie, he responded with typically blunt pragmatism, telling her to have a drink and forget about it – a solution he would now be pursuing in a pub somewhere with Allie. Absence really did make the heart grow fonder, Emma thought. Recently she and Ollie had been spending more time in their respective flats in London, as though trying to reproduce the same conditions of isolation that she now found herself regretting. Without the familiar work context, their differences tended to fester and, ironically, the relatively independent social lives they pursued on tour meant that their occasional arguments were more often resolved away from home where they were afforded the space and time to heal wounds and appease resentment.

Arriving at the hotel, Emma booked an alarm call and headed towards the bar. It was comically depressing, a windowless box situated in the heart of the building which, despite being on the second floor, felt as if it was in the basement. The dark wood, dim lighting and low ceiling seemed deliberately designed for illicit assignations, and made it feel oppressive and unwelcoming. The seating was pure 70s kitsch: orange cloth over Henry Moore-like rounded sofas and chairs. Peter, Susan and Claire looked miserable, but, as she neared them, Emma saw that the unflattering shadows on their faces and sunken eyes were the result of up-lighting.

‘Well done tonight. A really good show, I thought,' she said. ‘A drink?' She waved at their glasses.

‘No, we're good,' said Susan, speaking for the others as she often did.

‘We promised ourselves just the one,' said Peter, turning to Claire for confirmation. The latter nodded and Emma thought she caught a look of regret. Although a fully paid-up member of The Wet Set, Claire could on occasion fall spectacularly off the relatively teetotal wagon. On evenings like that she accepted drink after drink, each greeted with a qualification of ‘Just the one'. Susan, the self-appointed leader of the ‘sensible' arm of the group, could be controlling and needy in equal measures, and, though all of them could easily head off with the rest of the group, Claire could often be heard asking about the previous night's events and expressing her disappointment not to have been there. Still, with a short night like this ahead of them, Emma guessed that Claire would have chosen abstinence and that tomorrow her caution would be vindicated.

Emma ordered a glass of chardonnay for herself while Peter continued his account of a recent fling with a waiter, another in a line of brief encounters that had failed due to incompatible lifestyles. The conversation wound down at the same rate as the drinks in their glasses drained. None of them mentioned the evening's concert or the following day's trip to Tours, a pretence that suggested that here, in the gloom of a darkened bar, the conversation was a choice they had made and not a consequence of their nomadic existence. Emma insisted on paying for the drinks and they confirmed the time of their departure the following morning as they travelled up in the lift, mouthing a final, silent goodnight in the quiet corridor before retreating into their individual rooms.

Emma slept well that night and woke only once, visited by a repeating musical phrase that looped endlessly through her dream. It was the plangent, limping phrase from Josquin's
Nymphes des bois
:

‘
Josquin, Brumel, Perchon, Compère…
'

The Memoirs of Geoffroy Chiron: Livre I
ed. Francis Porter

Frevier 6, 1524

I, Geoffroy Chiron,
Chambrier
of St Martin at Tours,
Chapelain
to the Royal French Chapel, procurator to the late Johannes Ockeghem, loyal subject of François I, King of France, writing in the year of our Lord 1524, do hereby testify to the veracity of the events I here impart.

It is time for someone to set down the events of the life of Johannes Ockeghem so that his memory may be honoured. Today, February 6
^th
, 1524, is the twenty-seventh anniversary of his death. The provision for a composed Requiem Mass to be performed in St Martin in Tours no longer obtains, but I have spoken to the Bishop; prayers for his soul will be offered and a plainsong mass sung.

As I was fond of reminding Jehan, we met when I was a young choirboy at St Martin and our first conversation took place when I was but ten years old. He was, therefore, my guide from a very young age, and thenceforth throughout my career – first as clerk, then as procurator, then as
chambrier
; always as friend. He acted as my example and the words of his famous chanson served me well:
Prenez sur moi vostre example
[Take me as your example]. He taught them all: Desprez, Compère, Brumel, Busnois. Others made their acquaintance with him at events organised by composers and choirmasters throughout the land, travelling from their hometowns specifically to sit at his feet to learn firsthand the techniques of composition that he had mastered.

Today there are more people who have heard of Jehan Ockeghem through Desprez's composition than know Jehan's great works: the masses, the motets and the chansons. People should learn of the man and his music, and of his service to the Kings of France and the people of Tours. I will paint a new picture in words rather than through the medium of music.  

 

Johannes Ockeghem was St Martin's most famous singer. His duties as Treasurer and Baron of Châteauneuf meant that he did not always attend services and, as choirboys, we always felt flattered when he was part of our choir. He was immediately recognisable, not simply because of the striking scarlet cloak that he wore (made, it was rumoured, from cloth given as a gift by Charles VII), or because of his stature (he was a tall man), or even because of his impressively deep bass voice. No: it was because of his spectacles. Only the very rich wore them and, impressionable children that we were, they were cause for comment. Pierre Laffroy maintained that they enhanced the mental faculty and had nothing to do with vision. Writing contained knowledge, he explained, which should proceed by the most direct route into the brain. The glasses aided the process and that, he concluded triumphantly, was why sometimes Ockeghem was seen without his spectacles, his nose pressed against the choir book. It was, argued Pierre, through being close to writing that true understanding could be achieved. Looking back now it's easy to see that this theory suited Pierre perfectly – he himself had poor eyesight and always had to stand directly in front of the choir lectern. Through his physical proximity to the music, he was, according to his argument, the choirboy with the deepest musical understanding, a theory that might have been more convincing had his reading been more accurate.

Maître Ockeghem (as we knew him then) was the only singer of whom we were not afraid. Never did he hit or berate us, pull on our hair to keep us in time, or kick us if we sang in the wrong mode as did the other
chapelains
. Whenever he entered the room, the mood became serious and tranquil, for he had an air of calm that imposed decorum and order upon any situation. It was as if the phlegmatic humour that was so abundant in him was carried through the ether and enveloped us all. Under the choirmaster, behaviour in choir practices and the services was otherwise poor, we choirboys unruly, a cue that we took from some of the more rowdy
chapelains.

Although I knew him by sight, Jehan was not aware of me until that day he attended our class. It was there that we were taught the rudiments of music – the names of the musical intervals and the principles of discant – and we still wrote the solmisation symbols on our hands daily to remind ourselves of the notes of the gamut.

When Maître Ockeghem walked in that day you could have heard a stylus drop. We looked at each other, puzzled by his presence. We assumed that he had come to find Martin le Kent, our usual teacher (the Englishman whom none of us liked and whom we found difficult to understand) who had not yet arrived.

We must have looked confused, for Jehan laughed. His singing voice was attractive enough but his laugh exemplified his generosity of spirit: dark and rich, coming from deep inside his body, rumbling up from his stomach into a regular five-note pattern, repeated according to the level of his mirth.

‘Good morning, boys,' he said in his perfect accent, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘My name is Maître Ockeghem.' He smiled. ‘And can you say that? Ockeghem?'

We couldn't, for none of us could produce that distinctive ‘gh' noise that the Northerners make in their throat. In Tours we are proud of three things: that we are the capital city of the great nation of France; that our wine, made from vines which grow on the banks of the Loire, is the finest in the world; and that the way we speak is the purest and most perfect form of the French tongue. Thus everyone in Tours ignored the original pronunciation of Ockeghem and adapted it instead to the French tongue so it sounded ‘Oh-ke-gan'.

‘Don't worry if you can't,' he said. ‘I really don't mind.' And from feeling that we had let him down we were suddenly forgiven; we all returned his warm smile. Jehan went on to explain that Monsieur le Kent was ill and that, as a favour, he had agreed on this occasion to conduct our lesson on writing musical notation. He asked the boy closest to him, Denis Laforgue, what we had been studying recently and how class usually began. With trembling voice, Laforgue told him that we always started by cleaning our
cartellas
[blackboards] with a cloth, and that the last lesson had been on setting words to music.

‘Excellent,' boomed Maître Ockeghem. ‘That, boys, is one of my favourite subjects. So let us do as…?'

He looked at Laforgue expectantly.

‘Denis Laforgue, Maître Ockeghem.'

‘… as Monsieur Laforgue suggests, and clean our
cartellas
.'

Addressing Laforgue as ‘Monsieur' had pleased us all. We weren't used to such respect, and certainly would never have expected it from a luminary like Jehan Ockeghem. Some said that he was the most important man in Tours, more important even than the Bishop or the Mayor, by virtue of his connections to the King.

‘And what, Monsieur Laforgue, do we do next?' asked Jehan.

Laforgue beamed at this new-found status. ‘We write the clef, Maître Ockeghem,' he said, turning around to us all as if to imply that we, too, should show him the same deference.

‘Ah, the clef. Yes, of course,' said Maître Ockeghem, ‘though I expect we need to decide which clef?'

Laforgue's shoulders sank. He'd forgotten to inform Jehan that we usually wrote a C clef on the bottom line of the stave, the register with which we, as choirboys, were most familiar.

‘And, Monsieur Laforgue,' said Jehan, seeing his distress, ‘what clef do you like?'

Laforgue's face brightened. ‘The C clef, on the bottom line, Maître Ockeghem.'

‘And so it shall be. Please, everybody. A C clef on the bottom line.'

We all picked up our chalk.

‘Now,' said Ockeghem, ‘let us write in some notes. I would like you all to write a breve on that same line.
Ut:
the home note.'

We duly wrote in the first note whilst Maître Ockeghem sat back in his chair, took off his glasses and closed his eyes. Then, quite slowly and deliberately, he proceeded to dictate the notes for us to write. This went on for several minutes and I noticed that some of my colleagues were struggling. Many had written the notes too large and found that they had run out of space. Because my preference was for joining notes together, not merely because it saved time but because I preferred the way it looked, I still had plenty of space left.

When we had reached the end of the exercise, Jehan opened his eyes, put his spectacles back on and surveyed a room of glum faces. We all felt that we had failed. He stood up and walked around the room, looking at what we had done. It must have been immediately obvious to him that the exercise he had set was well beyond our ability and, with customary graciousness, he took the blame upon himself by praising our efforts. The work he saw here today, he declared, could not be bettered by any of the monks who worked in the scriptorium of St Gatien, or even by the great Jehan Fouquet. He had seen some extraordinary manuscripts, he proclaimed, collections of music from foreign lands decorated in aquamarine and gold leaf, adorned with pictures
of strange animals and freakish men, but never, never had he seen such clear and honest efforts. He had no idea, he added, that the boys who sang in the choir were such talented scribes.

When he got to my desk he stopped.

‘And your name is…?' he asked.

‘Geoffroy Chiron, Maître Ockeghem,' I replied.

‘Chiron? Ah, the centaur,' he said, ‘or should that be a foal?'

None of us knew what he meant and, seeing our incomprehension, he explained. Chiron was a centaur, half-man and half-horse, the half-brother of Zeus, who surrendered his immortality when the pain of a wound proved too great.

‘Well, well,' he said, looking at my work. ‘This really is excellent. You like ligatures, I see?'

‘Yes, Maître Ockeghem.'

‘We will have to keep an eye on you. You have a steady hand. And that is entirely appropriate, for the name Chiron comes from the Greek meaning “good with the hands”. You also have a good musical understanding.'

He turned to the rest of the class.

‘And that, boys, is what we must all aim for. We must not merely be singers: we must be musicians. We were put here on earth to comprehend the world and not merely to be agents of God's will, and we must understand music in the same way that we seek to understand God. And that is what young Monsieur Chiron has done here. He has not just written the notes: he has applied thought to the notes. Well done.'

As I look back now I can see that Jehan's praise was exaggerated in order to encourage me. He must have know that my use of ligatures was not conscious as he suggested, but merely an affectation like the loop of the letter ‘g' or the flourish of a signature wherein the letters of the name itself become impossible to read. It was an outward display with no real comprehension, but at the time I was so proud I could have burst.

What Jehan actually saw that day was a steady hand matched by a steadfast nature; I was accurate and I was neat, the two essential qualities of the scribe. It would be ten more years before he saw evidence of my hand again, when his usual copier had left the city to travel to Bourges and he needed help with the transcription of a new mass.

It is to Jehan Ockeghem, then, that I owe my early career as a scribe, a skill which, though he was happy to encourage, he viewed as only a stepping-stone to greater things. I should not, he insisted gently on several occasions, become an artisan when I had a brain and wit better suited to high office. Thus it was as a scribe that I began my working life and, with him as my patron, I was introduced to men of high office in the city of Tours for whom I would perform simple tasks such as drafting documents and even personal correspondence.  

 

I have wandered from the path again:
Ostende mihi Domine viam tuam et deduc me in semita recta

[Set me, O Lord, a law in thy way, and guide me in the right path]. 

 

This is about Jehan Ockeghem, as I must constantly remind myself. I am old now, the assured stroke of the quill that characterised my youth now subject to illness and an infirmity of age whereby my hand shakes and my fingers seize up, particularly in the cold, damp days of winter; sometimes it hurts to write at all and instead I am forced to turn my mind to contemplation. That is no bad thing for composition of any kind, as Jehan taught me. The process is one from thinking to writing, from designing in the mind to crafting on the page. Indeed that is my aim here: to set down the events as I witnessed them, to bring to my thoughts and to incidents the clarity of reflection, thence to refine them in the act of writing. And that, of course, is the same process as the one I developed through transcribing Jehan's compositions.