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Authors: Donald Greig

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Andrew could imagine most of it. He heard the texture thickening like a musical stew from the lower, steady notes upwards. All his early attempts had produced loose, almost abstract lines for the basses, but now that he had correctly identified the note values, what had originally seemed a dull harmonic underpinning was revealed as a free expression of genuine melodic force. At first anticipating and then echoing the faster-moving
contratenor
line, the technical assurance of the complex canon was astonishing. Above these duelling parts the
tenor
part moved serenely in a sequence of slow-moving notes like a stretched-out plainchant tune, though not one that Andrew had thus far been able to identify. Above that, the more obviously decorative
discantus
parts chased after one another to produce bright cascades of running scales. The compositional design was astonishing and, more than ever, Andrew was convinced that this was the work of a composer at the top of his game.

It worked. It really did. It was everything he had expected it to be, and,
marvellously
, as someone like Tinctoris might have said, it all fitted together. It had everything, as far as Andrew could tell. The final test would be hearing it sung, of course, but it was already more than promising. The canon between the
contratenor
and
bassus
at the interval of the fourth was centre stage, the same interval as Ockeghem's chanson
Prenez sur moi
– though that didn't prove it was by Ockeghem. It could be another composer referring to that work, or an unrelated echo of the same musical device.

Yet why had this
Miserere mei
never been performed? A piece this large had to be a commission of some kind, which required advance planning and organisation. And the number of singers required for its performance far exceeded that of any one choral institution. Given the vocal ranges, it was doubtful that boys would have sung the
discantus
lines but, if they had, then they would have been singing at the very least three-to-a-part which would mean twenty-seven of them; no choir school at the time had more than eighteen. And without boys, it required thirty-two adults at a time when the largest choir numbered only twenty-four.

The motet had to have been written for a big state occasion. Louis XI's funeral in 1483? Impossible. The paranoid, ascetic King was buried without state ceremony. But maybe Ockeghem, as
premier chapelain
and Treasurer of St Martin at Tours, both direct royal appointments, had written it as a tribute to his patron? The only other possible occasion would have been one where several choirs gathered together, such as the event in Cambrai at which Compère's
Omnium bonorum plena
was first performed. Three choirs – those of the French and Burgundian courts, and of the Cathedral at Cambrai – had joined forces to sing the new piece in which several of the singers were named.

Andrew knew he was missing something and that there were other musicologists who would have better hypotheses to offer. All of them would be in Tours. He'd perused the conference proceedings on the first flight, noted its usual ragbag of topics – a keynote paper which would summarise the state of Ockeghemian scholarship and doubtless add something more provocative, perhaps a new attribution. Or maybe something that tied Ockeghem more closely to Compère and Josquin, and once again raised the question of how much the older man had taught the younger? Then there were papers by other international scholars: on Ockeghem and musical puzzles; on Ockeghem and his links with churches in Paris; on Ockeghem and his relationship with Dufay (there were rumours that the meeting between the two of them in Cambrai in 1462 was not the only one); on Ockeghem and the liturgy; and two or three papers that would present the findings of the kind of archival research that would provide details of the composer's personal life. Andrew's hope was that some new piece of information would emerge which would make reference to the motet and even tie it to Ockeghem, a discovery the significance of which only he would fully appreciate.

Even without knowing the intended purpose of the piece, there was plenty to be going on with, the only possible problem being the very thing that made it so valuable: its uniqueness. Somewhere there might be another version of it, perhaps a better copy, clearer and more accurate, which would make his discovery a composer's sketch like the Bouchel composition scribbled in the back of a choir book in Cambrai in the 1450s. Andrew didn't want his scrappy version to be trumped by some later edition, and the longer he waited the more chance there was of such a catastrophe occurring.

The hand in which the manuscript was written had given him pause for thought. When he'd first begun to copy down the notes in the library in Amiens Cathedral, he'd noted the distinct characteristics of the writing. He'd realised immediately, and with some sadness, that it was not in Ockeghem's hand. Ockeghem's signature was steady and upright, the lettering like modern Gothic, composed of hard angles, no more so than the ‘e' which had the appearance of a flag on a pole. The script of whoever had written the music and the
Miserere mei
text was considerably more rounded, yet more functional as well; any flourishes were kept to a minimum, as if there was no time to attend to careful calligraphy. Where the ‘g' of Ockeghem's signature had a studied, neat swoop that ended with a horizontal serif, the tail of the scribe's ‘g', like all the other writing, sloped diagonally from left to right and ended with a loop.

In fact, the scribe's work seemed almost amateurish, far from the carefully spaced layouts of something like the Chigi codex, the text only loosely aligned beneath the notes, often abbreviated. It even contained a misspelling. It was clearly a very first rough sketch, perhaps dictated, from which a more careful and considered copy would have been made. It was no performing copy either, for no group of singers gathered round a choir lectern, let alone one consisting of thirty-four voices, could have read from something that small.

‘Would you like a drink from the bar, sir?'

Andrew had been oblivious to the pre-flight checks and take-off. Instinctively he hid the score.

‘Oh. Er. Yes. Tomato juice, please.'

‘Tomahto juice?' she confirmed.

‘Tomahto juice, yes,' he replied, making the Ts slightly wetter than usual.

‘Worcester sauce with that?' she asked, dropping a solitary ice cube into the clear plastic glass.

‘Er, no thank you.' He took the proffered drink and snack. Sipping the thick juice, he heard the song in his head: ‘You say tomayto and I say tomahto.' Pronunciation. That was another matter he needed to consider. How should Emma Mitchell's singers pronounce the text? If the piece had been written for Tours, then any final consonants of the Latin texts would only be pronounced at the end of a grammatical phrase. The sound would probably be more strongly nasalised than modern French, with words ending in ‘-em' sung as an [am] sound rather than [em]. In other words,
Iniquitatem
would come out
ih-nih-kee-tah-tam
, not
ih-nih-kwee-tah-tem
.

Andrew knew he was obsessed and once again recognised the symptoms: everything, even the seemingly trivial issue of fruit juice, came back to the motet. But he could allow himself a small pat on the back now, surely? Karen would sigh and roll her eyes if she were here – but she wasn't. The beauty of a flight like this was that he was on his own and could indulge himself. He was able to enjoy the airplane food at a leisurely pace unlike the fraught mealtimes at home or the slices of pizza he would hurriedly cram down in the staff canteen. He even had a glass of wine with the meal – French, from the Loire no less. Here, thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, he felt cocooned and pampered.

Over the next four hours he worked on the score, fortified by three cups of coffee. The man in the window seat was curled up in a foetal ball with a blanket over his head and once the crew had dimmed the cabin lights there were few distractions. Andrew's overhead light and that of the spare seat next to him described his workspace: the pad of blank music manuscript paper on his seat-table and the original transcription on the spare seat to his right.

A single sheet of paper no bigger than a greeting card contained the entire original score, but he didn't have enough paper to provide a complete transcription. It reminded him what an extraordinary model of economy the original notation was, like a dried sponge that expanded to a disproportionate size when wet. But even with a few bars missing at the end, his makeshift edition would nevertheless be sufficient for the purposes of his meeting with Emma Mitchell. In any case, it was a valuable insurance policy: he didn't know how much he could trust her.

Now that he had cracked the notational key, the copying part of his task was mundane and mechanical. If he'd had a pair of scissors he could have cut up the individual rows of notes and slid them easily into place above or below the initial statements, like pushing pieces around on a chess board. As it was, his task was orderly and soothing. Occasionally he took a break and rewarded himself with a moment of aesthetic appreciation, noting an interesting clash of a semitone here, a quirky cross-rhythm there. And then the gathering storm as finally all thirty-four parts moved inevitably towards a huge cadence, the shortening notes giving the impression of acceleration, the harmony pushing the ear toward final tension and a fulfilling resolution.

After two hours he had filled thirty pages in his neat script. The relationship between the words and the notes gave him the greatest problems for which he blamed the scribe. Nevertheless he had a good enough working knowledge of word stress and vocal line to resolve instances where the relationship between music and text was either unclear or clumsy.

It was a rough first edit and, as far as it went, satisfactory. His finished version would be far more thorough, each editorial decision footnoted, each
ficta
suggestion carefully qualified, the final, massive score prefaced by a short history of its discovery and its place in fifteenth-century music. Perhaps there would be a foreword by one of the conference delegates, an expert in the field with whom he might collaborate in the future. He felt a quiet sense of reassurance as he stacked the pages. There wasn't sufficient space to lay it all out here and he looked forward to that moment, probably in his hotel room with the bed used as a drawing board.

He reclined his chair and switched off the reading lights to grab ten minutes of sleep. As if on his cue, the cabin lights came on and the noises from the galley announced the imminent arrival of what would pass for breakfast. His neighbour stirred and emerged blearily from a nest of blankets, yawning. Andrew stood up to allow him to join the scrum of people gathered around the restrooms at the back of the plane, and stretched both arms to loosen his shoulders. His writing hand was cramped and the palm felt stiff and sore where the metal lock in the overhead bin had pierced his skin. From the galley a freshly lipsticked stewardess pushed a trolley towards him, dispensing antiseptically wrapped breakfast-packs. Hurriedly he placed his various papers into the blue folder and pushed it into his briefcase. He was tired now, his eyes stinging from the recycled air and unnatural light, and he took off his glasses and rubbed his face while he calculated the time differences: eight o'clock in the UK, landing at around nine: two in the morning in Ohio. No wonder he felt like this. Jetlag didn't just refer to the effects of a broken body-clock, as he knew from his experience of flying once from London to New York on a day flight. Even then, when his body knew it was only eight in the evening, the ground beneath him had shifted unpredictably and he'd found himself gabbling, as if he'd stayed up all night; the low cabin pressure and oxygen-depleted air took their toll.

The food, a rubbery croissant and raspberry yoghurt, was difficult to digest and he tried to wash it down with a cup of rusty-looking tea. He always tried to eat and drink what the locals did. He really needed the caffeine fix of coffee but decided to keep the treat of
un grand café crème
for Tours. After all, once he got to France he'd experience a quantum leap in culinary know-how. He smiled. It hadn't always been like that: in the fifteenth century it was the other way round, and the French were jealous of English cookery.

He rested an arm on the brushed aluminium armrest, laid his head back on the flame-resistant, foam-filled chair, and sipped his Indian tea from his plastic cup. Closing his eyes, he saw notes he'd just transcribed moving slowly across the page from right to left, dancing on the inside of his eyelids. Simultaneously he heard the sound of high voices singing descending phrases, a logical, musical pursuit supported by the lower voices, their strict imitation more difficult to discern in the thicker register. He wasn't hearing or seeing the exact lines, yet here and there a familiar shape emerged, much as the sound of his fellow passengers' conversations offered up the occasionally distinct sentence. Wrapped in the sonorous bath of meaningless chatter from the other passengers and his imaginative re-creation of the
Miserere mei
, the reality of his surroundings and the fiction of the musical performance became increasingly blurred. Andrew Eiger fell into a deep, easeful sleep.

Chapter 6
 

The alarm went off at five forty-five and Emma snapped awake, knowing exactly where she was and what the day entailed. Despite the itinerant lifestyle, she never woke in an unfamiliar hotel room experiencing the momentary, thrilling panic of dislocation. Nor, unlike her other colleagues, had she ever been roused from a drunken slumber by The Call of Shame, as it was wryly known.

She flicked on the light and stowed her alarm clock and sleeping pills in a United Airlines travel bag she'd filched from a Business Class seat on a transatlantic flight. The tablets were from her avuncular doctor, a fan of the group who, when she had described her lifestyle – the early starts, the late nights, the jetlag – suggested she carry them in case of emergency. It was a sweet thought, a gift rather than medicine, and, with them as a guarantee, sleep always came easily. As yet, she'd never had to resort to them and now they were merely part of her routine in an alien hotel, a ten milligram Temazepam tablet placed by the side of her bed next to her alarm clock ‘just in case'.

It was dark outside, the hotel quiet. She'd slept well, stirring in the night only when she'd heard the others come back. There was a vague memory of Allie's low bass rumble bidding someone goodnight – or had that been a dream? As she padded into the bathroom she saw that a note had been pushed under the door and her heart gave a little skip. She hoped it was a
billet doux
from Ollie, a response to the one she'd put one under his door saying that she missed him, signed with a jokey heart with an arrow through it. Such exchanges were part of a routine they'd established over three years of touring together, a touching, almost old-fashioned courtship. The heady days of teenager-ish infatuation had given way to a steady and relaxed mutual acceptance, which Emma took as evidence that she was finally in a mature relationship, one in which in the brain was as important an organ as the heart. The frenetic touring provided most of their excitement to which life at home was a quiet counterpoint. When she and Ollie treated themselves to an expensive meal out in London, she would find herself savouring it rather than loving it, and when they made love she was never as uninhibited and wanton as she had been with former lovers. When Ollie's ex-wife had broached the subject of divorce, Ollie and Emma had talked about living together, an idea they'd approached tentatively after yet another of his frequent moans about the torments of living in rented accommodation with no room to house all his books, CDs and extensive collection of comics. They had never taken that step and nowadays the subject never arose unless, as sometimes happened, it formed the focus of the group's dry humour, an expression of fondness for them as a couple, which made Emma blush and Ollie wade into the punch and counterpunch of teasing banter. They'd also briefly considered the subject of children, but both had agreed that Beyond Compère's current unpredictable success was rare in the world of professional music: it was the kind of wave few groups were fortunate enough to ride, and there would be time enough for Emma to engineer a sabbatical, perhaps leaving the group to fend for itself for six months in a few years' time. At Christmas lunch last year, her mother, who at Emma's age had already produced three children, had pointedly asked her daughter how old she was, as though she hadn't been present at her birth. Emma had patiently explained that things were different in the modern day, that more and more women were having children in their middle or even late thirties. ‘You're not a lesbian, are you darling?' her mother had asked.

Now, looking in the mirror, Emma's early-morning inventory revealed lines around her eyes, a reminder that she'd turned thirty last year. Susan, the self-confessed Moisturising Queen, who'd spent many a student summer holiday working on the ground floor in Selfridges whilst staying at her rich father's
pied-à-terre
in Baker Street, had promised to act as Emma's personal shopper in Tours while she was otherwise detained delivering her lecture. The erstwhile perfume seller could speak knowledgably and at some length on the principles of layering, bliss points and anti-oxidants, a script that sounded as rehearsed and polished as her singing, and had developed in Emma an almost junkie-like dependence on Clarins toners and moisturisers. For all her expertise, though, Susan always had a slightly overdone appearance onstage, more mask than face, and Emma preferred her own minimal approach to make-up.

She packed her things, pulled on last night's clothes, then rang down to reception to check that the cabs were on their way. ‘Aye, lass,' she was reassured in a warm, Geordie accent. In any other context she would object to being called a lass, but up here in the North East she sensed none of the patronising assumptions that she encountered in the South, only an affectionate concern. She picked up her luggage and scanned the room for anything she might have left behind, then stooped to pick up Ollie's note. It was a disappointingly short scribble: one large word and then a signature. Susan was emerging from her own room further down the corridor, immaculately made-up as always, her eyes, haloed in eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara, improbably bright for the time of day. They waved at each other, mindful of the ‘Do Not Disturb' signs on various doors.

Emma glanced at the note.

Sam-boo-kah!*

Love you

O

X

She had no idea what Sam-boo-kah! meant, and the asterisk, which referenced a tightly written footnote at the bottom of the page telling her to pronounce the word ‘in a Geordie accent', didn't help. She presumed that Ollie was talking about Sambuca, the clear Italian liqueur often served flaming with three coffee beans floating on the top. The reference to alcohol didn't surprise her; after rugby players, she reckoned that the hardest drinking culture was to be found amongst musicians, both ancient and modern. When she spoke to an audience she would often throw in stories of infringements of decorum at choral foundations, of which she had over the years collected extensive, humorous examples, most of them provided by academics willing to share their archival research. Thus she had a ready stock of stories about singers running off with money collected for parties, of drunkenness in church, or being paid in wine rather than cash. It seemed that fifteenth-century singers were just as likely to get drunk as their twentieth-century counterparts, and she would deliver these anecdotes to audiences with a raised eyebrow and a wry look upstage to the men of the group.

The exact details of how Ollie and the others had been drinking Sambuca would doubtless emerge. They'd visited Italy only two weeks before, and after the concert the tenors and basses had tried unsuccessfully to recreate a drink called a Zombie by layering several Italian liqueurs on top of each other. Maybe this was a continuation of that tradition?

The group were slowly assembling in the lobby, some talking animatedly, over-compensating for the early start, others moving carefully with sheepish grins, caught between residual inebriation and an emergent hangover. Of the men, only Craig looked awake, almost feverish, a radio clamped to his head, parroting information about the England cricket team's progress against New Zealand in the Second Test Match in Wellington to anyone interested. Emma hadn't really been aware that England played cricket in the winter until she'd travelled with Craig, whose sleep was disrupted more than most by his steadfast commitment to his beatified sport. In the summer months, he would scurry from rehearsals across the road to the local pub to watch a few overs, or stand looking gloomily up at the skies if rain threatened to disrupt a day's play. He approached Emma now, a stern expression on his face, and she thought for a moment he was about to tell her he'd lost his voice.

‘Play delayed. New Zealand put themselves in. Not much happened yet, but they've brought Caddie back. He'll sort them out.'

‘Oh. Thanks, Craig,' she said, despite understanding only the vaguest implication of his report, and he nodded like a soldier pleased to have delivered a message to his senior officer.

She found herself in a taxi with Allie, Ollie and Susan, which she knew would be awkward for them all. When Susan started asking her what she needed in the way of Clarins, Emma caught Allie rolling his eyes theatrically and Ollie responding with a grimace. The two basses had little time for Susan, thinking her shallow and superficial; though the accusation was not entirely unfounded, Emma often found herself taking the other woman's side in both private and public, pointing to her abilities as a singer and her command of languages which far outstripped that of either of the basses. In fact, they delighted in their ignorance, an obvious enough defence for their affected laziness, and often giggled like overgrown schoolboys at words in foreign languages. Emma had some sympathy for Susan, who lurched from one amorous disaster to another and demonstrated a quite staggering capacity for self-delusion in the short time that her unsuccessful relationships lasted. The soprano had variously gone out with her car mechanic, the man who repaired her boiler and – much to the delight of Allie and Ollie who competed over suitably obscene puns – her plumber.

Emma and Susan chatted about eye creams and lipsticks and ignored the men's silent, resentful communication. They were taciturn at the best of times but now they seemed to emanate hostility. Perched in the back seat between Ollie and Susan, Ollie seemed to shrink from Emma, avoiding the flirtatious press of her knee on his thigh, gripping the overhead handle with both hands so that his body was angled away. She knew from experience that Ollie was at his most guarded early in the morning, sensitive to bright lights and loud noises or any extrovert behaviour, including his own. When Susan searched in her handbag for a lipstick, the colour of which she thought would suit her, Emma took advantage of the pause to enquire about the previous night.

‘Short night, boys?' she asked, looking at both of them in turn.

‘Short. And sweet,' said Ollie, speaking for both of them.

‘Sambuca?' she quizzed, hoping one of them would elaborate.

They both laughed. ‘Tell you later,' said Ollie, continuing to stare out the window. At least on the plane she and Ollie would be seated together and would be far enough away from the rest of the group for him to disclose the full story without having to worry about sparing Allie's blushes.

 

The budget wouldn't stretch to the expensive tickets that would take them directly from Newcastle to Paris, so the route was to take them via London. Flying these days had none of the glamour that had attracted Emma as a girl and which had caused her to announce confidently at the age of seven that she wanted to be a stewardess when she grew up. It was the faded picture which her mother kept as a bookmark that did it: a super-slim young woman in a pencil skirt walking down the aisle of an aircraft with one arm on her hip, the other holding a silver tray of martinis above her head, a mythical image of independence and sophistication that spoke of an earlier, more optimistic age. Flying these days was purely functional: time to grab some food and read the paper, or do some work.

By the time they'd boarded, a tapestry of overheard conversations had provided a rough outline of the previous night's events but Emma heard the full story about the Sambucas from Ollie on the first flight. Allie, Ollie and Charlie had gone to the pub straight after the concert and worked their way diligently through three pints each of Newcastle Brown. ‘When in Rome…' was their motto, and, though they all thought the beer overrated, they shared the same unspoken concern that they would get called soft southern Jessies if they didn't drink the city's famous brew. They needn't have worried. The locals took to them, the more so when Allie, generous as ever, bought a large round. His instincts rarely failed him in such matters and he had picked a pub that regarded licensing laws as a fluid social experiment. Later, Marco and Craig had joined them after a quick pasta at an Italian restaurant around the corner. Having drunk a bottle of red wine between them, Marco had no intention of changing to beer and, when offered a drink by one of the group's new-found drinking partners, he'd panicked and blurted out the drink he would have ordered had he still been in the Italian restaurant.

‘Sambuca?' he asked in a quavering tenor voice.

‘Sam-boo-kah?' cried the Geordie. ‘Sam-boo-kah? What the blazes is that?'

Marco quickly tried to change his order to something less obscure, but the Geordie was already asking the landlord if he had any ‘Sam-boo-kah'. The word was picked up all around the pub and suddenly the singers were surrounded by a chorus of ‘Sam-boo-kah' chanted in broad accents. After that Marco had little choice but to drink the seemingly endless pints of ‘Newkie Brown' that came his way and they'd ended up getting to bed some time after two.

Now the late-nighters were sound asleep. Emma had no concerns about their performances later that day – they all had the constitution of oxes – but sleep would help, and she told Ollie to get forty winks while she checked through her papers for the day ahead.

 

The first flight arrived in London on time at 09.05. It was then a hop on the Tube to change terminals, followed by a wait of about an hour and a half. They'd all agreed that what they needed then was a fry-up: a good old-fashioned British breakfast, their due reward for an early start.

At Heathrow, Allie led The Breakfast Club (as Ollie insisted on calling it after a film that only he had seen) to his chosen restaurant. Over years of touring, Allie had sampled breakfasts in most airports and provided expert guidance to those who required it. Emma almost expected him to ask for his customary table. Reverently he intoned a mock grace – ‘Praise the Lard' – before tucking into his cholesterol-laden plate as if he hadn't eaten for weeks. Emma would have been quite happy with a coffee and a croissant, as would Susan (who'd chosen the more healthy scrambled-eggs-and-smoked-salmon option, much to Allie's disgust), but there were times when individual preference was overridden by an unspoken demand for collective conformity.

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