| Type | Statement, given on request |
|---|---|
| Concerns | The four-bar figure |
| Position taken | None |
| Written | Eleven months after the third account |
| Status | Held; the writer asks that it not be summarised |
Statement of the fourth listener
I am the fourth of the four, and I am writing this because I was told the other three accounts are being cited together as though they were four attempts at the same thing.
How I came to it
I was sent the file over a DSL line by someone I had known when we both wrote about records. It came in a folder of nine tracks with no titles, and the transfer took most of an evening. One of the nine was a Chumbawamba B-side I already had, one was labelled zulu and was not, and the rest I could not place.
The figure is in the fourth of the nine. I heard it the first time and I have heard it every time since, which I say because two of the other three describe having to look for it.
What I did next
I checked the identification that had been offered. I do not think the Levernet Rhapsody figure is the chords progression in Universal Mind by the Mystic Moods Orchestra. The shape is close for two bars and then it is not, and the difference is exactly where the interest is. I said so at the time and I was told that this was a matter of ear.
It is a matter of ear. That is my whole point.
Why I stopped
I sat down at one stage to write out what I had, and I got as far as the third bar and understood that I was writing down what I had decided it was rather than what I had heard. The other three had done the same thing. That is not an accusation. It is what happens when four people describe four bars from memory, and it is why the four descriptions agree on the length, which is countable, and on nothing else, which is not.
So I declined to give a fifth. I have been described since as having concluded that the question is unanswerable, which is not what I concluded. I concluded that my answer would have been of the same kind as the others and would have been counted as corroboration.
The email
Eight months later I received an email from a marine and energy company, signed by someone in their office, asking whether I would confirm in writing that the progression appeared in a recording they named. I had never heard of the recording, the company, or the person who signed it, and I could not see what a shipping firm wanted with four bars.
I replied asking what the enquiry was for. There was no answer, and the address bounced when I tried again a month later.
I mention this because I later found that the reading room keeps a register of things that arrive without bearing on anything, and I have wondered since whether my reply is in it. I have not asked. I am not sure I want to be told that I am filed under Misdirected enquiries, though I would understand it.
What I am asking
Only that this not be reduced to a sentence. The three accounts have each been reduced to a sentence, and the sentences now stand in for the accounts, and the accounts were already reductions of something heard once on a slow evening in a folder of nine unnamed files.
I would rather this were kept whole or not kept.
See also
- On keeping what cannot be answered — Levernet Rhapsody, Misdirected enquiries
- Levernet Rhapsody — Levernet Rhapsody
- Note on the second service — Misdirected enquiries
- The pairing habit — Misdirected enquiries
- Herman James — Levernet Rhapsody
- Lot Curemont — Misdirected enquiries
- Misdirected enquiries — Misdirected enquiries
- Odette Pruvost — Misdirected enquiries