Attribution to a Single Composer

The Attribution to a Single Composer is the standing procedure by which a musical holding in the Tower is assigned to one named composer and to no other. It is not a doctrine in itself but a form of closure: the point at which a work ceases to circulate under multiple candidate names and settles, in the record, under one. The procedure is administered by the Office of Systematic Attribution and is the operative expression of the Principle of Singular Attribution in the musical holdings, though the two are not identical and have been distinguished by clerks at every opportunity since 11,880.

Attribution to a Single Composer should not be confused with the Protocol for Contradictory Attribution, which permits two mutually exclusive attributions to stand together where they are filed in non-communicating catalogues. The two arrangements are frequently described as rivals. In practice they are sequential: the Protocol governs the period before closure, and Attribution to a Single Composer governs the period after. A holding may spend four centuries under the Protocol and a single afternoon under Attribution to a Single Composer, and most of the Office's labour consists in managing the transition rather than the result.

Origin and first application

The procedure was set out in Nineteenth Concordance Amendment 7, ratified in 11,904 following the attribution of the Lament of the Silent Bell Cantata to Composer Mael. The Mael case had run for eleven years across three catalogue systems, and its resolution produced a form of words the Office has used, with minor revision, ever since: that a work is attributed to a single composer "when the record admits no second name without the interposition of a new record." The phrasing is deliberately circular. It was drafted by Clerk Orra Vint, who is reported to have said of it, in a minute preserved at Aperture 214, that "a definition which cannot be escaped is a definition which need not be checked."

The first application of the procedure outside the Mael case occurred in the winter of 11,906 on the ninth gallery of the Vault of Ambiguous Records, when a folio of twenty-two part-songs was closed to a composer named in the margin only as "the younger of the two." The closure held. The margin has since been the subject of nine separate inquiries, none of which has reopened the attribution.

The single-composer hearing

Closure is pronounced at a hearing before three Librarians, of whom no more than one may have handled the holding previously. The constraint is intended to prevent what the Office calls "familiarity of hand," and it is enforced by a schedule kept in the anteroom of the Attribute Ledger chamber. The schedule is posted each morning and has been misfiled twice, in 11,971 and 12,044, both times by clerks who subsequently sat on hearings they should have been excluded from. Neither ruling was overturned; the Office holds that an improperly constituted panel produces a valid closure provided the panel did not know it was improperly constituted.

Hearings are short. The composer's name is read, the candidate names are read, and the presiding Librarian asks whether any candidate can be reached without the interposition of a new record. If none can, the attribution is entered. If one can, the hearing is adjourned and the holding returns to the Protocol. Adjournments are common; closures are not. Of 4,118 hearings recorded between 11,950 and 12,050, 611 resulted in closure, and of those, 94 were later found to have been adjourned without the adjournment being entered.

Relation to the Selene holdings

The procedure's most contested application concerns Composer Selene of the Seventh Spire. The Elegy for an Unwritten Law was closed to Selene in 11,988 under Attribution to a Single Composer, on the strength of her residency at the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire as recorded in Seventh Concordance, Revision 12. The closure has never been formally challenged, but it has been repeatedly annotated. A marginal hand, identified by the School of the Unnamed Scribe as that of The Binder, observes at folio 41 that "a residency is a place of work and not a place of authorship," and the note has been cited in eleven subsequent hearings without ever being adopted as reasoning.

The Office's position is that the annotation, however persuasive, is not a record, and that the interposition of a new record is precisely what it forbids. This has produced the unusual situation in which the Office's own arbitrators, who are described in their commission as Purist, routinely reason as Realists when the annotation is raised. Arbiter Silt has defended the discrepancy on the grounds that "the mandate describes what we are for and the rulings describe what we do, and the Tower has always kept these in separate rooms."

Scholarly disagreement

Two readings of the procedure's scope persist. The narrow reading, advanced by the compilers of the Attribute Ledger and supported by the Taxonomic Collapse papers of 12,013, holds that Attribution to a Single Composer closes only the name of the composer and leaves every other property of the holding open — date, provenance, instrumentation, and the question of whether the work is finished. On this view a work may be attributed to one composer and to four dates, and the Office has no business with the dates.

The broad reading, maintained by the Office itself and by most of the Quiet Bureaus, holds that a closure of the composer necessarily closes the work, since a work is not separable from the person who made it. The broad reading has the practical advantage of ending inquiries. It has the theoretical disadvantage of contradicting Clause 14 of the Concordance of Unfinished Works, which presumes that an unfinished work retains its composer while its other properties remain in motion. The contradiction has been noted in every recension of the Concordance since 12,001 and reconciled in none.

A third position, associated with the Precedent of the Unnamed Scholar, argues that the procedure is not a ruling at all but a filing convention, and that its authority derives entirely from the drawer in which the result is placed. The precedent is cited rarely and always in dissent.

Records and maintenance

Closures are entered in the Attribute Ledger in iron-gall ink, in a hand distinct from that of the hearing clerk, and are sealed with the Office's small seal rather than its great one. The distinction matters: a closure sealed with the great seal is void, a rule dating from 11,933 and arising from a mis-stamped entry that stood for forty years before anyone noticed. The great seal is kept in a different room for this reason.

Entries may not be corrected, only superseded, and a superseding entry must quote the entry it supersedes in full. The result is that the Ledger's later volumes are largely composed of earlier volumes, and the Office has twice petitioned for a separate volume of quotations and been twice refused. Clerks are reminded that the Ledger is not to be consulted during a hearing; it is to be consulted before one, and the reminder is printed on the inside of the chamber door, where it has been read by everyone and followed by most.