Time Will Tell Read Online Free PDF

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 Columbia 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