Floor 14,734: The Gallery of Unfinished Symphonies

Floor 14,734: The Gallery of Unfinished Symphonies is a branch holding of the Spiral of Unfinished Symphonies, opened in the winter of the year recorded as 3,882 by the Concordance of Vertical Reckoning and administered since 3,914 under the joint seal of The Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies and the Chamber of Deferred Judgement. It is the higher of the two registered Galleries and should not be confused with Fl. 331: The Gallery of Unfinished Symphonies, which lies some fourteen thousand floors below and answers to a different registrar.

The distinction is not merely vertical. Where the 331 Gallery preserves symphonic works in non-auditory form — scores, marginalia, the residue of rehearsal — the 14,734 Gallery holds those final movements that were never composed but were nevertheless, at some point, heard. The holdings are therefore acoustic rather than documentary, and are stored accordingly.

Founding and the Problem of the Ninth Landing

The floor was designated a Gallery by instrument of the Curatorium of Unfinished Likenesses following a survey conducted by the clerk Maude Ferrow, who had been sent to confirm that the landing was empty and returned with a catalogue of forty-one items. Ferrow's survey notes, filed as Ferrow Schedule 14,734, record that the movements "presented themselves for registration in the order in which they were missed," a phrase later struck by the Chamber and reinstated by the Chamber's own revisory annex in 3,921.

The first accession, entered 4 Ilvane 3,882, is listed only as Finale, unattributed, in D — heard twice, on separate landings. It has never been assigned to a work. Three attempts to match it to a named symphony have failed, and the fourth was declined on procedural grounds by the Office of Attributive Restraint.

Acoustics and the Rule of the Unfinished Echo

The Gallery is architecturally contiguous with the Whispering Gallery tradition, though no direct passage joins them; the contiguity is a matter of resonance, not of masonry. The Rule of the Unfinished Echo, first set out in Third Concordance, Annex 4, requires that no unfinished movement be played to completion within the Gallery, since a completed performance would render the holding finished and void its registration. The Rule is enforced by the simple expedient of the Gallery's acoustic design: every alcove is tuned so that sound returns a quarter-tone flat before it can resolve.

"A thing half-sounded is held; a thing sounded through is spent. Let no Librarian spend the holdings of this floor to gratify a visitor."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 9

Visitors are admitted on the ninth and twenty-third hour only, and are asked to remove their shoes at the threshold. The floor is laid with mute-stone salvaged from the Vault of Unfinished Business, which absorbs footfall but retains a faint warmth for some hours after a large party has passed.

The Classification Dispute

Since 3,947 the Gallery's holdings have been divided, on paper, into the Audible Fragment, the Remembered Absence, and the Projected Close. The three classes were devised by the registrar Ovin Tarr and adopted without division. They have been contested ever since by the Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies, which maintains in its Revisory Note on the Tarr Classes that the third class is a contradiction: a close that was projected but not composed cannot be a movement, and a movement that cannot be heard cannot be unfinished.

The Chamber of Deferred Judgement has declined to resolve the question, holding that it is not ripe. The Concordance of Vertical Reckoning, at clause 212, states that no holding may be classified by a registrar of lower rank than the floor it occupies; clause 213, two lines later, states that no floor above the 12,000th is subject to classification at all. Both clauses remain in force. The Gallery's holdings are accordingly listed as Projected Close in the register and as unclassified in the inventory, and both documents are displayed at the entrance.

The disagreement reached its furthest point in the winter of 3,962, when a visiting party from the Garden of Unfinished Symphonies requested the Projected Closes and were furnished with the Audible Fragments instead. The error was traced to a mislabelled inner stair and was not corrected for eleven years.

Inventory

The Gallery's principal holdings, as of the 3,988 recension:

• Forty-one Audible Fragments, of which nine are held in duplicate.
• Sixteen Remembered Absences, including the well-known Absence in B-flat, sustained.
• Two hundred and six Projected Closes, all unclassified.
• The Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies, on loan to the Gallery since 3,940 and not expected to return.
• One empty alcove, reserved, accession number withheld by order of the Chamber.

Access and Contiguity

An inner stair connects the Gallery to the Garden of Unfinished Symphonies, though the stair arrives at the Garden from above rather than below, a matter the Concordance of Approaches notes without explaining. The Gallery also maintains a small sub-annex of drawings and rejected attributions, contiguous with the Gallery of Unfinished Portraits on the floor above by a service passage that appears on no plan.

Requests for transfer of any holding to Fl. 331: The Gallery of Unfinished Symphonies must be made in writing to both Chambers and are, as a rule, not answered. The Gallery's keeper since 3,971, Hessel Prine, has recorded that no transfer has ever been completed and that she regards this as correct.