Time Will Tell Read Online Free PDF Page B

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