Phantom Compositions

Phantom Compositions are works of music, notation, or performed sound which are held to exist in the repertoire of the Tower without ever having been composed. The category was admitted to the master catalogue in the winter of the year recorded as Intercalary 44, following the Seventeenth Concordance, which granted them provisional standing pending review — a review that has convened eleven times and adjourned eleven times. Phantom Compositions are distinguished from the merely lost by a single criterion, set out in the same Concordance: a lost work was once whole, whereas a Phantom Composition has never at any moment possessed a complete text, and yet is reliably performed.

They are catalogued under the jurisdiction of the Archive of Unheard Melodies, which maintains a separate shelf for them at the north end of the ninth gallery. That shelf is longer than the archive.

Characteristics

A Phantom Composition is identified not by its notes but by its residue: the traces it leaves in the listening record. Hearers report total recall of a piece they cannot hum, and the recollection is stable across witnesses. Two Librarians who compare accounts of the same performance will agree on the key, the tempo, and the exact moment the second subject fails to arrive, while disagreeing on whether there was a second subject.

The standard instrument of detection is the Phantom Thermometer, which registers a fall in ambient phaneric load wherever a Phantom Composition is being played. Readings are taken against the Phantom Thermometry Scale and logged in the silvan unit. A performance registering below silvan 2 is considered incidental and is not entered. A performance registering below silvan 0.5 is generally agreed to have been a rehearsal.

Because the phaneric field fluctuates during a Silent Interim, Phantom Pollen sifted to Sigma-3 may be substituted as the measurement medium, accumulating on the plates in patterns that correspond, loosely, to the shape of the missing score.

The Krull Recension and the dispute over notation

The central scholarly disagreement concerns whether Phantom Compositions may be written down. The Ninth Concordance treats their transcription as a permitted composition of plexocentric operators under Annex VII, and the Registry of Surface Compositions accordingly records eleven such transcriptions on the acoustic-dampened tiles of Spiral 97, composed — per Clause 14-d — of Veinstone. The Phantom Vellum on which the working drafts were struck with attenuated nickel-silver tools retains their impressions, which no one has yet read.

Against this, the Krull Recension of the Fourth Concordance holds that transcription destroys the phantom, on the reasoning that a thing written down has a text and therefore cannot lack one. Both Concordances are in force. The practical consequence is that the eleven transcriptions exist in the Registry and nowhere else, and the works they transcribe continue to be performed.

"The score is not the piece; the piece is the interval between two performances of it, and that interval has been found to be inhabited."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, note by the Clerk of the Ninth Gallery

Incidents of record

The best-documented Phantom Composition is the Nocturne for the Lower Landings, first reported in the year 61 by the Phantom Librarian of the West Stairwell, who heard it played on a floor she could not thereafter locate and transcribed forty-one bars on the back of a requisition. The transcription was filed; it has since grown three Phantom Appendices, each a plausible further movement in a slightly later hand. The Appendices Office declines to remove them, noting that spontaneous accretion is diagnostic of the documentary rather than the musical phantom and that the distinction, in this instance, has never been made.

Less well documented, and more frequently cited, is the affair of the usher Marrow Fenwick of Floor 208, who in Intercalary 47 attempted to halt a performance of an unlisted work on the grounds that no authorization existed for it. The performance continued. Fenwick's report, filed in triplicate, describes the players as "present throughout." No member of the ensemble has ever been identified, and Floor 208 has no musicians.

Maintenance note: the north shelf of the ninth gallery is not to be dusted. The dust falls from above.

Relation to other phantom holdings

Phantom Compositions are classed alongside, but not with, the other phantom holdings of the Tower. The Seventh Concordance places them outside the Phantom Thermometry Scale's original remit, which was drawn up for phantom alloys; the scale was later extended to them by usage rather than by amendment, a circumstance the Standing Committee on Concordance Amendment has described as "regrettable and now load-bearing." They are not Phantom Alloys, which are structural, nor Phantom Pollen, which is atmospheric, nor the work of the Anticipatory Phantom, which arrives before it is expected rather than without being made.

Any update to the master catalogue that references a Phantom Composition must be entered on Phantom Vellum, per the requirement laid down for all Phantom entries, and countersigned by the Archivist of the West Stacks. The Archivist currently signs 30 forms a day, and no more.

Inventory of admitted works

As of the last stocktaking, the following are carried on the open register. The list is not closed; it is merely unaccounted for at its end.

• Nocturne for the Lower Landings — with three Phantom Appendices
• Six Bagatelles, of which four survive — the arithmetic has never been reconciled
• Offertory for a Closed Floor — performed twice, both times to an empty gallery
• Untitled (196) — the number is the only certain element
• The West Stairwell Variations — attribution disputed; see the Phantom Catalogue of Floor Ξ-9

It is a condition of the register that nothing in it may be counted twice. One work has been counted twice. The Librarians are aware of which one, and have declined to say.