Attribution Arbitration for Contested Cantatas

The Attribution Arbitration for Contested Cantatas is the formal procedure by which the Tower determines the authorship of unfinished musical works whose compositional lineage is ambiguous, interrupted, or disputed by more than one claimant. It is administered by the Chamber of Deferred Judgement, which serves as the initial fact-finding body, and governed principally by Clause 14 of the Concordance of Unfinished Works. The procedure is not to be confused with Verification Arbitration, which settles whether a work exists, nor with Attribution to a Single Composer, which is the outcome the Arbitration is frequently accused of presuming in advance.

The Arbitration concerns itself only with works that stop. A cantata finished to its final bar is outside its jurisdiction however bitterly its authorship is disputed; the Chamber has declined eleven such petitions since the procedure was regularised, each time citing the same formula, that completion "removes the question from the register of the unfinished" (Chamber of Deferred Judgement, Standing Note 3).

Origin and procedure

The procedure was regularised in the winter of Spiral 19, following the discovery in the Spiral of Unfinished Symphonies of four partial settings of the same text, in four hands, each breaking off at the same word. The Chamber was instructed to determine whether the four were one work or four, and returned the finding that the question was premature, a ruling that has since become the model for the procedure's characteristic caution.

Proceedings open with the filing of a claim, ordinarily on Form 7,117-δ under the Protocol for Contradictory Attribution, which operationalises Provisional Attribution pending hearing. The Chamber then commissions stylometric analysis from the archivists of the Spiral, who return a report of not fewer than forty pages and not more than one conclusion. Memorial acoustics are weighed where relevant, under Annex 3 of the Concordance of Lingering Impressions, a provision drafted for the reverberant dead and applied to the incomplete with some strain.

Hearings are held on the floor of the work's deposit, never elsewhere, on the reasoning that a cantata's attribution may depend on the room in which its last page was left. Petitioners are reminded that the Chamber does not sing.

The problem of the final bar

Most contested cantatas terminate mid-phrase, and the Chamber has developed an elaborate vocabulary for the precise manner of stopping: the arrest (a held note abandoned), the ellipsis (a cadence withheld), and the abandon (the copyist simply stops, sometimes mid-word). Each carries a different weight in the stylometric report. A work ending in arrears of a semiquaver is treated more favourably than one ending at a barline, on the ground that barlines attract forgers.

"Where the final bar is present and the final note is absent, the work shall be attributed to the hand that wrote the bar, and the absence noted in the margin in red."

— Clause 14 of the Concordance of Unfinished Works, Clause 14(c)

The red margin has become a small industry of its own. Marginalists in the employ of claimants have been known to argue for weeks over the shade, and the Chamber has twice ruled that the precise hue is not arbitrable.

The Purist–Realist dispute

The Arbitration's most persistent scholarly difficulty is the tension between the Principle of Singular Attribution and the practice of the Office of Systematic Attribution, which, while officially Purist in mandate, routinely employs Realist pragmatism in its rulings. In practice this means the Office will declare a single author and then, in the same breath, list three hands as materially present.

The School of the Unnamed Scribe has objected to this on a point that has never been satisfactorily answered: if a work is attributed to one composer, what is to be done with the other four who were, by the Chamber's own finding, in the room? The Office's reply, recorded at Central Log of Contested Holdings entry 9,341, is that presence in the room is not presence in the score. The School has appealed this formulation four times; the appeals are pending before the Board of Concordant Arbitration, which has scheduled them in an order it declines to disclose.

A related difficulty attaches to the case of Archivist-Provisional Epsilon, recorded as principal scribe of Codex VII though the attribution is contested, and to that of Senior Librarian Kael, recorded as primary author of Concordance 17 on similar and similarly disputed grounds. The Chamber has ruled that a contested attribution of a Concordance does not invalidate the Concordance, a decision described by one dissenting member as "a house standing on its own upper floor" (Dissenting Opinion of the Fourth Seat, Spiral 24).

Notable contested holdings

The Arbitration's docket is held partly in the Vault of Ambiguous Records and partly, where the dispute has outlasted its shelf, in the Floors of Contested Reality. The following are regularly cited as instructive:

• The Cantata of the Ninth Landing, unfinished at the word "henceforth," claimed by two scribes and one widow.
• The Winter Fragment, whose three hands were shown by stylometry to be one hand writing slowly.
• The setting catalogued only as 7,117-δ-bis, which is itself the form filed to claim it.

Disputes crossing floors are referred to the Department of Vertical Arbitration; disputes crossing offices, to the Office of Concordant Arbitration. Where a claimant disputes the Chamber's own jurisdiction, the matter is heard by the Warden of Boundary Arbitration, who has held consistently that jurisdiction disputes are not themselves cantatas and may therefore be resolved.

Criticism and the standing objection

The procedure has been criticised since its regularisation on the ground that it must always choose, and therefore cannot report what it most often finds — that a cantata was left unfinished because two people were writing it. The Chamber's answer is that the Tower requires an entry, not a truth, and that an entry with a red margin is more honest than a gap.

The Concordance of Lingering Impressions offers, at Annex 3, a partial accommodation: where the evidence is genuinely balanced, the work may be entered under the phrase "the hand that stopped," which the Chamber has used 214 times and which no claimant has yet accepted. Matters are further complicated by the requirement, reaffirmed at the last revision, that all contested scores be re-shelved within forty days of hearing, by which time the hearing is usually still in progress.