Free The Courage Consort by Michel Faber Page B

it's a plum part for a bass, I have to admit. But I don't see us singing it far into the twenty-first century somehow.'
    Again the silence descended. Minutes passed. Catherine noticed for the first time that there were no clocks in the Château de Luth, except for those inside the computers and the oven, and the wristwatches worn by the human visitors. Perhaps there had once been splendid old timepieces which some previous guest had stolen—she imagined Cathy Berberian stealthily wrapping an antique clock up in her underwear as she was packing her suitcase to go home. Perhaps there had never been clocks on these walls at all, because the château's furnishers had understood that the sound of seconds ticking would have been maddening, intolerable, in the forest's silence.

    Suddenly, there was a plaintive, inarticulate wail from outside, a cry that was more high-pitched and eerie than anything Axel was capable of. Catherine's flesh was thrilled with fear.
    'There!' she said to Ben. 'Did you hear that?'
    But, looking across at him, she saw that his eyes were shut, his great chest rising and falling rhythmically.
    Catherine jumped up from the couch, hurried to the front door. She opened it—very quietly so as not to wake Ben—and peered out into the night, which was impenetrably dark to her unadjusted eyes. The forest was indistinguishable from the sky, except that there were stars in one and not the other. Catherine was half-convinced that Dagmar and Axel had been consumed by some lonely demon, swallowed up into the earth, never to be seen again. It was almost disappointing when, minutes later, both mother and baby materialised out of the gloom and strolled up to the château, Dagmar's white trainers luminescing.
    'Did you hear the cry?' said Catherine as Dagmar reached the threshold.
    'What cry?' said Dagmar. Axel was wide-eyed and full of energy, but his mother was exhausted, overdue for bed. She swayed in the doorway, looking as if she might consider handing her baby over to Catherine for a while.
    ***
    N EXT DAY , R OGER telephoned Pino Fugazza, to tell him that there was a problem with
Partitum Mutante.
A technical problem, he said. They'd rehearsed it so thoroughly now, he said, that they were in a position to tell the difference between awkwardnesses that arose from unfamiliarity with the score and awkwardnesses that might be … well, in the score itself.

    While Roger spoke, the other members of the Courage Consort sat nearby, wondering how Pino was going to react, especially as Roger was pushed,
poco a poco,
to be more specific about the nature of the problem—which was that, in a certain spot, Pino's time signatures just didn't add up. The Italian's daring musical arithmetic, a tangled thicket of independent polyrhythms, was supposed to resolve itself by the 404th bar (symbolising the 4,004 years from Creation to Christ's birth), so that Roger and Catherine were suddenly singing in perfect unison, joined in the next bar by Julian and Dagmar while Ben kept lowing underneath.
    'The thing is,' said Roger into the phone, 'by the 404th bar, the baritone is a beat behind the soprano.'
    A harsh chattering sound came through the receiver, indecipherable to the overhearers.
    'Well…' grimaced Roger, adjusting his glasses to look at the computer screen. 'It's possible I've misunderstood something, but three lots of 9/8 and one lot of 15/16 repeated with a two-beat rest … are you with me?'
    More chatter.
    'Yes. Then, from the A-flat, it goes … Pardon? Uh … Yes, I see it right here in front of me, Mr. Fugazza … But surely thirteen plus eight is twenty-one?'
    The conversation was wound up very quickly after that. Roger replaced the telephone receiver on the handset and turned to his expectant fellow members of the Consort.

    'He gives us his blessing,' said Roger, frowning in bemusement, 'to do whatever we want.'
    It was a freedom none of them would have predicted.

    Later that