March of Saint Edras

#On the Repertoire Before the Ear

This is a survey of the March of Saint Edras as it stands in A.S. 201, compiled from a single documented ear. The ear belonged, and still belongs, to Deputy Archon Werrenrath, late of the Strasbourg administrative quarter, presently counting coal at Bastion-Shipka. His dossier records that he could identify twelve authorised variants of the March and thirteen unauthorised variants. Those are the figures. They describe what Werrenrath knew, which is a smaller thing than what exists and a larger thing than most clerks know about anything.

The survey offers no origin. The composer is unrecorded. The first performance is unrecorded. The date on which some officer of the Bureau of Orison first pressed wax beside one version and withheld it from another is unrecorded, and I decline to supply one, though the temptation sits on my desk like a warm loaf. What the record holds is a man, a count, and a preference. From those a Hieromnemon may build a great deal, provided he builds nothing that was not already lying in the yard.

#On the Twelve and the Thirteen

Twelve were licensed. Thirteen were not. The arithmetic is a scandal before anyone has sung a note, because it means the Church's own March has more unlicensed shapes walking about than licensed ones, at least within the hearing of one deputy.

I will not name them. The dossier names none. It does not say which of the thirteen strayed in its words, its pacing, its turns of melody, or merely in the absence of a signature on the proper sheet. A lesser chronicler would invent a river variant and a trench variant and a thirteenth with a shocking final cadence, and the Codex would acquire twenty-five compositions it has never examined. Records has a word for such scholarship. The word is forgery.

What I may say, because I said it in the original dossier and it was printed under my name, is that the unauthorised variants were better and spread faster. That judgment is mine. Nobody measured it. No Bureau ran a tally of mouths across the provinces, setting licensed against unlicensed parish by parish. I heard enough of the matter to form an opinion, and an opinion from a Hieromnemon, once printed, acquires the dignity of furniture.

The embarrassment lives in the counting itself. To know twelve authorised versions, Werrenrath had to hold the licensed sheets in memory with an archivist's exactness. To know thirteen unauthorised versions, he had to have listened, repeatedly and attentively, to music that Orison had declined to license or had never been asked about. Both lists required the same ear. The Church trained that ear to recognise sanction. It neglected to fit a governor that would stop the ear enjoying what fell outside it.

#On Permission and the Listener

Orison licenses hymnals. Doctrine states the matter without ornament: an unauthorised melody falls under doctrinal enforcement, and taste is no defence. A licence is ink, wax, a countersign, a sheet that may be issued to a chapel or a workshop with confidence that it will not drift. Each of the twelve authorised variants passed under some such hand. Which hand, when, and on what terms, the survey cannot say.

Werrenrath's Strasbourg desk received petitions on chapel licences, procession timing and musical dispensations. His relation to the March was the customs clerk's relation to coin: he knew it by weight and ring, and by the faint wrongness of a counterfeit. The file assigns him nothing more. It names him as author of no version, keeper of none, and the licensing seal on none of the twelve.

Three acts must be kept apart here, and the Bureaus keep them apart even when they forget why. Recognition is a clerk's duty. Approval is an office's. Enjoyment appears in no office's warrant, and therefore in everyone's file.

The incident that brought a Confessarius to note Werrenrath did not involve the March. It involved a grain-queue antiphon, a separate piece entirely, whose third line a clerk had flattened and whose correction Werrenrath then sang himself, with warmth. The dossier classifies that antiphon as non-ratified devotional residue. The classification belongs to the antiphon. It does not travel to the thirteen unauthorised Marches, and readers who wish to staple the two together will find that I have hidden the stapler.

#On the Ear Sent East

Werrenrath left Strasbourg on an ordinary transfer order bearing the seal of Personnel Harmonisation, with a countersign from War and no visible mark of the Bureau of Shadows. The causal relation between the Confessarius report and his departure was, and remains, officially unacknowledged. My own report mentioned him. He moved. The Codex records both facts and declines to draw a line between them.

At Shipka the ear became useful, which for a man of taste is a fate worse than suspicion. The bastion lives by sound: pump bells, rail horns, wake-peals, work-calls. A man who can sort a licensed cadence from a barrack-room parody after two notes is worth more there than his cuffs suggest. Werrenrath reviewed local work-calls, caught a dangerous lull pattern before the Bureau of Purity arrived with ropes, and sorted the song scraps left on his desk into three columns: harmless, dangerous, effective.

Those columns were his, and the scraps were the rail quarter's. The dossier does not show the March sorted into any of them, and I will not sort it now. The pump-calls that kept crews awake are pump-calls. Whatever the thirteen unauthorised Marches did or did not do in the field, no report credits them with holding off the sleep that presses from Syrion's side of the Line, and the Codex will not award a tune a battle honour on the strength of its neighbour's.

What the transfer proved is narrower and more irritating. A man whose ear carried twenty-five versions of a single devotional march was moved to a place where hearing correctly is a survival trade. Strasbourg lost a deputy who knew too much music. Shipka gained one. The March stayed wherever marches stay, which is in mouths, and mouths were not transferred.

#On the Name Retained

Saint Edras lends his name to more than this tune. Ration-stones on the pilgrim roads promise one meal to him. Strasbourg keeps its Weeping Pilgrimage, the Procession bears his name, and Iberia has its own devotions around reliquary fragments. There is a Hymn of Saint Edras and a Third Psalm of Edras. A shared saint makes none of them one composition with the March, and none tells us when the March was written, for which occasion, in which key, or by whose pen. The saint is a crowded address. Many songs receive post there.

The Bell Codex, ratified in A.S. 115, governs bells. It supplies the March with neither licence nor date, and anyone who borrows its seal for the purpose will hear from Records.

What remains of the March in the record is this: twelve forms the Church licensed, thirteen it did not, one deputy who knew them all, and one Hieromnemon who printed that the wrong ones were better. Orison may correct the count when it audits its own sheets. It may not correct the preference. I have checked.