Landing of Unfinished Symphonies

The Landing of Unfinished Symphonies is the broad, shallow platform at the head of the western stair of Spiral of Unfinished Symphonies, from which the Spiral's upper branches are entered. It is not a floor proper: the Landing carries no number in the register of numbered levels, and the Roll of Numbered Floors records it in the margin as a "half-holding" — a designation that has caused four hundred years of friction and one very long memorandum. It is administered jointly by the Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies and the Spiral, under the terms of the 88th Concordance, and it is the point at which every unfinished work admitted to the Spiral is formally received, weighed, and set down.

There is no railing on the western side. Visitors keeping to the marked edge are advised that the Reception Desk does not call upward.

Description and dimensions

The Landing measures 41 metres at its widest and 18 at the narrowest, where the stairhead pinches between the Abutments of the Fourth Return and a shelved recess known as the Reliquary of Deferred Endings. Its paving is of pale undressed stone, cut in the ninth century of the present fabric and relaid at least twice, the second time after the water damage of the winter associated with the 14th of Fallow, when a burst conduit beneath the eastern colonnade flooded the receiving line to a depth of nine centimetres.

The platform is divided by three brass setting-lines, each 4 mm wide, into two receiving ranks and a marginal walk. The lines are not decorative. A work placed across a setting-line has been ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it could not be said to be "on" either rank — a ruling first recorded in Librarian Adwell's Register of Refused Placements, and never overturned.

Appointment	Established	Current custodian
First Receiving Rank	c. 912	Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies
Second Receiving Rank	c. 912	Spiral, by deputation
Marginal Walk	1044	Unassigned
Reliquary of Deferred Endings	1177	Neither; see below
Weighing Ledge	1301	Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies

Function

Every work entering the Spiral is set down on the Landing before it may rise further. The Chamber maintains the Weighing Ledge at the northern end, where a work is weighed not for mass but for obstruction — the number of performers, lecterns, and tuning appointments it requires, which is to say, the amount of floor that would be committed to it if it were ever adopted. The obstruction is entered in the Roll of Obstructions and a place is assigned accordingly. A work of low obstruction may proceed directly to the Anteroom of Unfinished Symphonies; one of high obstruction is held, sometimes for decades, and is described in the register as "parked".

The Landing's second function is the reception of the Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies when the Choir processes to the Spiral's upper branches. The Choir's passage takes four days and the Landing is closed to other traffic for the whole of it. The closure is posted at the foot of the stair by hand, on a card, which is generally the wrong card.

Maintenance is quarterly. The eastern colonnade is swept on the first restday of the quarter; the platform is swept only if the colonnade was swept, and the colonnade was not swept in the last two quarters of the thirty-fourth year of the present recension.

The dispute of the Marginal Walk

The Marginal Walk was laid out in 1044 as a strip on which nothing was to be set down. It was, by design, furnished with nothing. By the eleventh year of the recension its 63 square metres were governed by two Concordances that do not permit of joint administration, and the resulting quarrel has never been settled — it has been reduced.

"The Marginal Walk is walkway, not holding; it shall not be appointed, nor assigned as standing for any work."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4 (1049)

Against which, in the note appended to the same instrument:

"All floor within the stations of the Landing is holding; the Landing is not to be understood as a thoroughfare."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 4 (1049)

The reader may judge that the two annexes were drafted within the same fortnight by the same clerk. The record does not say so. The record does not say otherwise.

The working compromise is that no work is placed on the Marginal Walk and no Librarian walks on it either. In practice the strip is used by no one, and the brass lines that bound it have been re-cut once, in 1611, by a party of clerks who never explained themselves in writing.

Office of the Weighing

The Weighing Ledge is attended by the Office of Weighing, a bureau of the Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies whose jurisdiction ends at the Setting-Line and whose influence does not. The Office maintains The Scale-Ledger — one page per work admitted, in order of weight, and (again) in order of admission. It is the fallibility of the second ordering that animates the Office's grievances.

The Grievance of the Clerk Anselm, filed in the spring of the year of the six towers, concerns precisely this: the Office's resident clerk had entered a work on the Scale-Ledger under the heavier of the two orderings; the adaptation of the same work, mounted two floors up, was wrongly charged to Anselm's page bearing both orderings; and the ledger was replanted, so the notation "which is the heavier single" was left in the margin with a dry exclamation mark. The incident was appealed to the Prefect of the Third Stair, then to the Prefect of the Sixth Stair, who declined to hear it, and the clerk's grievance was left posted. The Office of Weighing does not repeat itself and the marginal note is not used.

Relationship to the Floor

The Landing is discontinuous. The Census of the Second Stair treats the Landing's approach, at the re-entrant, for the purposes of the Floor at entry, as taking the seventeen metres of the fourth and fifth partitions of the Still Lower Colonnade as a coaxing of the Weighing Ledge. The second approach, at the stairhead, takes the sixth and seventh partitions of the same colonnade as the setting of the seventh, and the seventh — which is the reading of the Census of the Second Stair — is the one accepted. The difference, expressed as floor length, is irregular by the first reading and shown as a length of uncertain by the second, so the two texts describe floors 177 years old and 14 years old respectively.

See also

• Spiral of Unfinished Symphonies
• Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies
• Anteroom of Unfinished Symphonies
• The Garden of Unfinished Symphonies
• The Unfinished Metacollection
• Unfinished Systems
• The Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies