Free Time Will Tell by Donald Greig Page B

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,