I. Allegro moderato
That which I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.
J. S. Bach
Chapter one
Lent term, 1987
Cambridge
Philip Broomby had an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach that he was surrounded by people who were better than him.
Not better people – Philip knew that most of them wouldn’t hesitate to kick an old lady down a staircase if it meant getting to the top a few seconds quicker, and the oak-panelled study held so many overinflated egos that it was a miracle there was room for them all. In matters of personality and morality Philip had a definite head start.
What bothered Philip was the suspicion that they were better composers than him. And Philip would happily have swapped being a good person for being even a moderately successful composer.
It was, he knew, a rather archaic dream. In a different century he might have found employment by a King or a Cardinal, but in a decade where most music was judged solely by the hair and make-up that went with it, any chance of a career as a serious composer in the old-fashioned sense was absurdly small, even for the student composer elite at Cambridge University. Which was why the atmosphere in the room bristled with tension: nobody present was under any illusion but that they were rivals, competing for uncertain and unlikely places in the history of music. Philip himself would have settled for a footnote, though at the moment completing his PhD seemed a hard enough mountain to climb.
Eager to demonstrate their credibility as the big names of tomorrow, the others talked loudly and ostentatiously – the more opinionated their views and obscure their references, the more impressive they hoped to sound. ‘You couldn’t say Purcell was a great composer,’ said a girl called Ellen Holnes, who wore an extra large chip on her shoulder because she was both from a comprehensive school and female (the latter making it statistically all but impossible for her to become a composer).
‘I wouldn’t say he was a composer at all – more an arranger,’ said a student with a permanent sneer called Joss Boscombe, hoping that everyone would be appalled by such a bold statement. Without any visible sign of being either impressed or appalled the others continued their conversation, though Philip shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He liked Purcell. Was that wrong? Did the fact that he couldn’t see why Purcell shouldn’t be considered a great composer make him less of a composer himself?
Philip wasn’t the only person sitting in silence. The other was Geoffrey Bennett, the bespectacled young composer whose work they had been assembled to discuss. He sat next to the grand piano in the corner of the study in silent apprehension; the work in question, Pandemonium IV, had been well-received when performed back in December, but Geoffrey felt far less certain of praise from so many rivals. To hide his anxiety he pretended to listen intently, nodding occasionally with a smile plastered to his face as if he was on a slightly higher intellectual plane.
‘You wouldn’t compare him to Bach,’ Joss insisted, then with a snigger added ‘even J. C. Bach!’ The others laughed humourlessly, more to show they understood the joke than that they found it funny. All except for Philip, who genuinely couldn’t see why you wouldn’t compare Purcell to J. C. Bach.
‘Bach?’ queried Ellen. ‘Is he still the benchmark?’ The others looked at her uncomprehendingly and she smiled, satisfied that she had the upper hand. ‘I mean, he died over 200 years ago – haven’t we moved on?’ A hush descended on the room; at last somebody had managed to make the controversial statement everyone had been aiming for.
‘He’s still the best,’ a bookish postgraduate called Nick Rush coldly declared from his position amongst a pile of records in the corner. The others in the room murmured their agreement.
‘The best?’ a new voice echoed, and all eyes turned to follow it. Professor Eamonn Mackenzie, the owner of the study, stood in the doorway with his eyebrows quizzically raised. The silence in the room took on a reverential feel: Eamonn Mackenzie was not only their composition teacher, he was a man who had achieved what they all coveted, a place in the history books. For, by late twentieth century standards, Eamonn Mackenzie was almost a successful composer. Even though he wrote music that had no commercial potential, which rarely saw more than one performance and which the most regular concert-goers were largely unaware of, he managed to make a substantial living from his music without ever having resorted to writing advertising jingles.
In fact, he hadn’t written any music for over two years; 1985 had been a bad year, starting with the loss of a family member and continuing with his fridge developing a serious fault, as a result of which he had decided it was to be his annus horribilis and he wouldn’t be able to write a note. The following year had been spent making a protracted recovery from his annus horribilis. However, he continued to cultivate the aura of respect that surrounded him, primarily by making his students painfully aware of how far they were from their goal. In the two and a half years he had been doing his PhD, Philip had grown used to Eamonn describing his music as ‘boring’ or ‘mousy’ or, at best, ‘worth rescuing’. Eamonn’s opinions were feared, his most meagre compliments cherished, and what his students dreaded most was finding themselves on the wrong side of an argument with him – especially in public.
‘Why is Bach the best?’ Eamonn asked, causing uncharacteristic looks of uncertainty to dart between the young hopefuls in his study. Was Bach the best composer? Or should they say it was Wagner? Either way, what was the reason? Anyone who dared to speak risked being torn down by the voice of authority in front of their peers.
Nick Rush eventually spoke up. ‘Because Bach put notes in a better order than anybody else,’ he said, a little tentatively.
‘Of course I agree,’ Ellen Holnes said, having decided that she didn’t want to be in the minority after all. ‘I agree that Bach put notes in a better order than most other composers, but there are an infinite number of orders for notes to be put in so I think other composers might have found an equally best order.’
‘Like Wagner,’ Joss Boscombe threw in before anybody else could.
Philip wondered to himself how, if notes could be put into an infinite variety of orders, anybody had the right to decide what orders were better than the others. As far as Philip was concerned, Purcell’s orders were just as good as Wagner’s.
‘But there’s not an infinite number of orders for notes,’ Eamonn bluntly corrected Ellen, ‘there’s a finite number of notes, ergo a finite number of combinations. You should all bear that in mind in case they run out during your lifetime.’ He surveyed the room, enjoying the stunned, serious looks on his students’ faces before adding, ‘you all realise that I’m joking, of course.’
Laughter rippled across the room, this time of relief.
‘Now,’ continued Eamonn, ‘you all know Geoffrey?’ Geoffrey Bennett flashed his increasingly nervous smile around the room and raised his hand in a half wave. ‘Why don’t we see what order he has put notes in and ask ourselves whether he could have found a better one?’ Eamonn produced a cassette from the inside pocket of his dusty tweed jacket, compulsory uniform not only for almost successful composers but also for Cambridge professors. ‘Tell us a bit about the piece,’ he suggested.
‘Ah… well… ah ha ha!’ responded Geoffrey, nervously removing his glasses and studying them as he spoke. ‘I think perhaps it would be best to let the music – er – speak for itself?’ Without his glasses was happily ignorant of his teacher’s disapproving frown, but in the silence that followed he became increasingly agitated, turning his glasses over in his hands repeatedly and eventually attempting to conclude his sentence again to get things moving. ‘Then I can – ah ha ha – talk about it afterwards if you like?’
‘We’re going to talk about it afterwards,’ Eamonn told him with a hint of annoyance. He had a way of doing things and he wished his students would follow his instructions.
‘Yes, indeed. Ah ha ha!’ Geoffrey had unwittingly started to accompany his nervous laugh with a self-effacing bow. ‘It’s, ah… well, I’d prefer to, er… ah ha ha!’ He put his glasses back on and, now in a position to see his teacher’s facial expression, let out a few more laughs and bowed with renewed vigour. ‘I think it’s – er – important – ha ha! – to hear what’s, er, in, ha, the music, ah, without, ah ha ha – ah – ha ha. Ah.’ Geoffrey bowed one more time and surveyed the room with a smile.
‘I see.’ Eamonn threw the cassette in the direction of Nick Rush, who put his hand up and caught it instinctively. ‘You’re nearest, you can work the machine. So, this is called…’ – Eamonn allowed exactly the right length of pause to communicate a sarcastic pair of inverted commas around the title – ‘“Pandemonium IV”?’. Geoffrey laughed and bowed in agreement. ‘I think we’ll listen a couple of times,’ Eamonn unenthusiastically decided as scores were circulated.
‘It’s – ah ha ha! – it’s not the most professional recording, I’m afraid!’ Geoffrey apologetically explained.
‘Alright, we’ve got ears’ snapped Eamonn, with a nod towards Nick, who obediently pressed the play button.
An incoherent orchestral rumble emerged from Eamonn’s modest tape recorder. Eamonn watched the reactions of his students with interest; Ellen wore a distant smile by which she both communicated her superiority to the composer whose work she was listening to and safeguarded her ability to come down in favour of the work should the others in the room decide the notes had been put in a good order. Joss nodded to himself and occasionally gave a little silent chuckle, as if hearing things in the music that nobody else in the room was aware of. Geoffrey smiled and bowed modestly each time Joss chuckled, acknowledging whatever moments Joss seemed to be noticing even though he wasn’t aware of having written them. Nick Rush gave his undivided attention to the merits of Ellen’s breasts.
Philip listened to the noise with a frown, miserably wondering again if the fact that he didn’t get this kind of music meant that he was an inferior composer. He would certainly have far rather been listening to Purcell, and nothing he wrote himself ever sounded like this. He liked to compose tunes. But nobody else doing a PhD in composition ever seemed to write anything approaching tunefulness. Was he doing it wrong?
Philip’s concern wasn’t only motivated by a desire to secure himself a place in the history books. His problem was that having spent the last ten years working on the assumption that he was going to be a composer, he couldn’t imagine anything else he might possibly do. His whole life revolved around music, but apart from listening to the stuff, composing was the only bit of it that he excelled at – or so he had optimistically thought when, two and a half years previously, he had embarked on the PhD that he thought would cement his career.
He certainly wasn’t cut out to be a performer. He had long since realised that he didn’t have the patience to become even a moderately great pianist, so he had given up learning whole pieces and had instead taught himself the first eight bars of every single Beethoven sonata, since this was the bare minimum needed to enter a drawing room and impress old ladies before modestly declining to play any more. Sadly, since he lived in 1980s England rather than a novel by Evelyn Waugh, Philip had never been confronted with this situation. Nevertheless, he would sometimes sit in his room playing them through in the hope that somebody would interrupt him and think that he was a far more capable pianist than he was.
He had perhaps managed to pull off a similar trick with his composing. Here he was, midway through his final year of a PhD in composition, without having yet completed a single substantial piece of music. Everything he ever took to show Eamonn was underdeveloped and insubstantial, fragments and sketches – so what hope did he have of completing a decent piece of music? Was he wasting his life and his dreams on something he wasn’t very good at? At the start of the course, Eamonn had said to him ‘you shouldn’t compose unless you can’t imagine doing anything else.’ At the time Philip had felt it was a sign of his innate musicality that he truly couldn’t imagine doing anything else; increasingly he was wondering if it might simply be symptomatic of a lack of imagination.
Yet he didn’t lack ideas. In his head he could hear the music that he wanted to write, though it was an effect rather than a tune or a series of chords: a single note, played by a single instrument, emerges from the silent forces of a full romantic orchestra, a tiny sound at first…
There was a click and Philip blinked, pulling himself back into Eamonn’s study where he had evidently managed to listen to the bulk of Pandemonium IV without actually hearing it. He sat up, adopting an expression of wise analytical curiosity as if he were pondering the wider implications of what he had just heard. He glanced around the room, meeting the eyes of a few of the other composers, who were all nodding with an expression of wise analytical curiosity. Nick was rewinding the cassette and Eamonn still stood by the doorway with his hands in his pockets and a crocodile-like smile on his face. ‘Well,’ he commented, and chuckled loudly. Geoffrey instinctively chuckled as well at the ambiguous appraisal of his music, though it came out as more of a sob. Eamonn continued to smile. ‘I think we ought to have our second listen before we say anything,’ he proposed, a suggestion which was received with much more nodding.
Philip steeled himself for the repeat hearing, determined to concentrate for its duration in case he was called on to say something intelligent. The orchestral rumble began as before and once again he was bewildered – why would somebody write this? And who would ever choose to listen to it?
For a moment, Philip felt that maybe he was better than this after all. Damn it, he wrote tunes! Something that people might actually want to hear! And in his head his ideas were fantastic. He just had to find a way of writing some of them down.
He’d get on with it as soon as he’d cleared his desk. There was a pile of receipts to go through, mixed in with a pile of papers and letters going back several months, some of which might even be important or require a response. Philip had discovered that morning a note in his handwriting at the top of the pile which said ‘Clive – 10.00’ and which, worryingly, had today’s date at the top of it. Philip didn’t know anybody called Clive and couldn’t recall what he might have been doing with him either earlier in the day or later that evening. Perhaps it wasn’t a name, but then what was it? Something beginning with ‘C’ that was happening live?
It couldn’t be something to do with the party, could it? Philip sighed inwardly at the thought of the party – he had been hoping to forget it for a couple of hours.
It had been his housemate Laura’s idea to have a party, but nothing was ever simple with Laura. She was a difficult girl; a mood of depression clung to her like a damp coat, but she combined it with an attitude of unbearable superiority that radiated in her every action. The kind of girl who smokes with one foot turned inwards. Philip had learned to live with this, because Laura was ultimately someone who deserved to be pitied rather than despised; she worked all day in an office which co-ordinated school inspections and her ability to converse centred around predictable anecdotes about the hilarious mistakes that happen when you’re co-ordinating school inspections, such as the time when Margaret had send a bundle of reports to Islington rather than Impington and all the schools had got completely the wrong results. Apart from this desperately uninteresting focus, Laura’s life revolved around eating, watching television and going on a weekly date which invariably ended in her coming home and crying on the stairs – but what else could you expect if your one and only topic of conversation was the high drama of co-ordinating school inspections?
Organising so many school inspectors had also given her an obstinate streak that made her impossible to argue with – even in the situation Philip had found himself that morning, when, making final arrangements for the party which had been Laura’s idea, Laura had informed him that she wouldn’t be able to make it as she was going on a date. Their other housemate, David, who didn’t have a personality but liked football, had already excused himself a few days earlier with the muttered pretext that he ‘didn’t really like parties’ (when challenged with evidence to the contrary he had clarified ‘not in my own house. It’s an invasion.’).
‘Philip, please,’ Laura had dolefully begged, wearing such an anguished expression that the happiness of the rest of her life might have hung on it, ‘I’ve never met anyone like him and he’s booked theatre tickets and everything’.
Philip sighed again. He didn’t much like parties himself, and was half-inclined to leave the house keys under a flowerpot for their guests and make alternative arrangements for the evening. Perhaps if he could remember who or what Clive might be it would give him the necessary excuse. He could remember writing the note saying ‘Clive’, which made his complete ignorance of its meaning even more frustrating.
Philip suddenly realised that he was sitting in a silent room, everyone breathing quietly and attentively. His heart leapt with panic – had he been asked a question? Was everybody waiting for him to speak?
Nick leaned over to the tape recorder and stopped it. A rustle passed through the room as its occupants relaxed and Philip’s heart calmed down as he realised that he was safe, even though he had failed yet again to listen to anything past the first thirty seconds of Pandemonium IV.
All eyes turned to Eamonn and his crocodile smile broadened. This was the bit he enjoyed.
‘I’d like to begin, if that’s okay by everyone.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘Perhaps I could start by asking the composer this: why “Pandemonium IV”?’
‘Ah, ha ha ha!’ chucked Geoffrey, with a humourless grin. ‘That’s… ah, well, I was trying to – er – create, if you like, a – ha ha! – a musical, ah, pandemonium.’ He looked around the room for support and, finding very little, added ‘but in music, as it were’ to clarify his aims, then rounded off his explanation with a final ‘ah ha ha!’
‘And the number?’ asked Joss, laconically.
‘Ah… ha ha! Number?’ Geoffrey raised his hand to remove his glasses then seemed to think better of it and replaced it in his lap.
‘It’s called “Pandemonium eye-vee”,’ Joss cynically elaborated. ‘Why “eye-vee” exactly?’ More than one person in the room secretly found this rather hypocritical, as Joss’ compositions always had titles along similarly meaningless lines.
‘Oh, four!’ nodded Geoffrey, ‘it’s “Pandemonium Four” because… ah ha ha…’ Geoffrey’s grin threatened to engulf his broken explanation. ‘As you may have noticed it breaks into four main sections, with the – ah – pandemonium, as it were – ha ha – getting, erm… more chaotic in each. Ah ha!’
Philip hadn’t noticed the four sections, not having been in a position to notice much in the music at all. But then, he thought to himself, if there had been any real variation between the sections they wouldn’t have drifted past him in such a monotonous way and he might have stayed awake for more of it.
‘It is interesting to hear that was your intention with the four sections,’ Eamonn said, lacing the word “intention” with a lethal dose of irony, which Philip found reassuring. Perhaps Eamonn hadn’t noticed the sections either. ‘One of the reasons I feel this piece fails so monumentally is that the fourth section is by far the weakest’.
‘Ah. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’ responded Geoffrey, forcing his mouth to maintain its grin as if in appreciation of the constructive criticism he was receiving.
‘Let’s look at the score,’ Eamonn continued, turning the pages of the photocopy in front of him. ‘Yes. Here. Bar 337. This is the beginning of the fourth section, yes?’ (Philip was impressed. Eamonn might be tactlessly rude about his students’ compositions, but it was always from a position of insight.)
‘Ah ha ha!’ nodded Geoffrey. ‘That’s the… er… that’s right. Ah…’
‘So presumably this is meant to be some sort of climax, this…’
‘Well, ha ha, it’s…’
‘If I could finish,’ Eamonn relentlessly continued, ‘I’m talking about this open fifth spread across the whole orchestra, which seems climactic in intent but in effect is a complete damp squib.’
A silence followed. Even the most critical of Geoffrey’s contemporaries couldn’t help reeling from the knife that had been so casually thrust between their fellow composer’s ribs.
‘It’s… ah… the, that’s the… er…’ stuttered Geoffrey, now clinging to his forced grimace with a huge sustained effort. ‘…it is, er, the, er… ah ha ha!’ Eamonn looked at Geoffrey condescendingly, his wordless gaze infinitely more convincing than Geoffrey’s explanation. ‘It is the highest chord – er – the highest moment – the fifth is the highest chord in the…’
‘But it’s not a chord,’ Eamonn came back, exasperated, ‘it’s nothing.’
‘Well, ah ha ha ha ha ha!’ laughed Geoffrey, desperately. ‘It’s not exactly nothing, is it?’
‘Perhaps…’ Ellen sat forward with a look of inspiration on her face. ‘Perhaps it would actually be more effective if there was nothing there?’ All eyes turned to her in incomprehension. ‘I mean,’ she explained, ‘if the climax was, literally… nothing. Silence.’
‘But… ah ha ha,’ Geoffrey had stopped smiling in bafflement. ‘It needs something – it’s the climax, it has… inevitability!’
‘I don’t think it does need something,’ smiled Ellen, shaking her head sadly.
The floodgates were open. Ellen had expressed her opinion and the other composers in the room wanted to proffer their own wisdom.
‘It’s not really inevitable, is it?’ Nick commented, waving his copy of the score. ‘Show me anything in here that inevitably leads up to an open fifth.’
‘And it’s not pandemonium,’ added Joss. ‘Is it? When I wrote the panic section of Ozone Synthesis I felt I needed to lose control, you’ve done the opposite.’
‘What – ha ha! – what do you mean, exactly?’ Geoffrey enquired, rekindling his grin, which was surely by this stage deeply painful.
‘It’s in four sections. It repeats the same material until it arrives at an open fifth. Pandemonium suggests anarchy and chaos – but your piece is very ordered, isn’t it?’
‘Well – ah ha ha!’ Geoffrey looked at Joss and, presumably feeling he was on safer ground with one of his contemporaries, decided to try a more patronising tone. ‘I think you’ve rather misunderstood the piece.’
It was an unwise move. Joss shot him a deadly smile and responded ‘I think we’re all a bit bewildered. Aren’t we?’
Joss’ question encouraged a reluctant murmur of agreement from the others in the room. The sides were drawn – it was a group assassination. Geoffrey’s uncomfortably fixed grin indicated that he realised his position.
‘You see – ha ha ha – it’s about layers. I mean – I don’t mean – what I mean is, I wanted it to… it’s about increasing levels of pandemonium. Getting – ah – closer to the ultimate – the – ah – the chaos, or… or anarchy which you are… ah… talking about. Ah ha ha.’
‘But if anything,’ Professor Eamonn Mackenzie’s voice rang out again, ‘the sections get more ordered.’ Philip felt that he was witnessing the musical equivalent of a fatal road accident, both horrifying and fascinating; overall he was finding it strangely satisfying that his reservations about the piece were being confirmed, but he couldn’t help wondering what would happen if his own music were under the same scrutiny.
‘But…’ Eamonn turned and looked straight at him. ‘Does Philip agree?’
Philip caught his breath. There had been some sick enjoyment in driving by slowly to see Geoffrey squirm helplessly in the face of Eamonn’s undiluted public belittling but he had no desire to become complicit in the suffering. ‘You’ve been very quiet,’ Eamonn was saying, ‘tell us what you think.’
Right. ‘Um…’ Sound confident. Knowledgeable. ‘I agree… that the four sections made the whole thing too ordered to really achieve the intended effect…’ But? There had to be a But, or he was just finishing off the ritual sacrifice. ‘But…’ he started, hoping that something would cross his mind, and then it did: ‘but there were some interesting musical effects.’ Encouraged by Ellen’s seraphic smile, Philip decided to make a slightly riskier assessment. ‘I thought the second section was particularly absorbing. Almost hypnotic.’
‘And the fifth?’ enquired Eamonn.
‘I… I thought there were only four sections,’ stuttered Philip, confused.
‘The climactic fifth in the fourth section,’ sighed Eamonn, ‘does it work?’
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Philip. The time for risk-taking had passed; he decided to join the mob. ‘No, definitely not. The fifth is definitely an anticlimax. Definitely.’
‘It’s from a different pen’ contributed Ellen dreamily. There was a moment of silent mystification as people pondered the meaning of the comment and Ellen smiled as if fully aware that her words were far too deep to be understood by the mere mortals around her.
Geoffrey was the first to recover. ‘Ah… ha ha ha…’ he started. ‘What I… ah… I think what the fifth is… is a… ah… a different level of… er… pandemonium in that… although it’s, ah, a different kind of sound, it’s actually more intense than what’s come before.’
‘But it’s not,’ insisted Eamonn.
‘Well – ah ha ha! To my ears it’s a suitably intense climax.’
‘But it’s not.’
‘Ah. Ha ha ha. Ha.’ Geoffrey sat back, no more words left to defend the smouldering remains of his music. Eamonn strode into the centre of the room, enjoying the kill.
‘The problem with you young people,’ he announced, ‘was that you try to communicate an experience through music when you don’t actually have any experience yourselves. Emotional experience. You probably don’t even know what pandemonium really feels like.’ He looked at Geoffrey, who still sat smiling his hideous waxwork smile. Philip mused that if good composing was reliant on emotional experience then the last half hour should have given Geoffrey the raw materials for a genuine masterpiece. ‘Of course, too much turbulence and one can’t compose at all,’ Eamonn continued, ‘you’ll recall my annus horribilis two years ago…’. There was a collective sigh. Having experienced the infamous annus horribilis when it was happening they didn’t have any great inclination to hear all about it again. ‘…and of course if one doesn’t have any way to keep food fresh…’ Eamonn was saying. ‘But I can’t say I regret it happening. No, not one bit. It’s about experience – to communicate fulfilment in music a composer must first know what fulfilment is – and without experience what do you have?’ He looked at Philip. ‘Your music is sexless. Frigid.’
Philip gulped, hoping that Eamonn had looked in his direction purely at random and was referring to the music of inexperienced composers in general.
‘All of you have ideas. But anyone can have ideas – you need experience to turn them into music. So,’ concluded Eamonn, cheerfully, ‘go out and get experience. Fall in love, fall out of love, get laid, get hurt. An unhappy love life is more useful to you as composers than no love life at all.’ He glanced casually at a clock on the mantelpiece, which showed the time as two minutes to four. ‘Nearly three – I must ask you all to leave.’ One of Eamonn’s eccentricities was to leave his clocks on British Summer Time, all year round, which he claimed was ‘quite unbearable’ in the winter but worth it for the feeling of euphoria when they were finally telling the right time again.
Eamonn concluded the session by thanking Geoffrey for sharing his music (“Ah ha ha. Yes.”) and declared the discussion a success which ought to be repeated. ‘Who’s due for a performance soon?’ he asked. ‘Philip?’
Philip sat up like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a juggernaut. ‘What?’
‘You’re having some kind of symphony performed this year, aren’t you?’ Eamonn asked, and all eyes settled on Philip. Even Geoffrey managed an unimpressed look, perhaps relieved that he would no longer have to wear the victim’s mantle.
‘Well… yes,’ admitted Philip. ‘But, er… it’s not written yet.’
Eamonn was amused by the look of panic that alighted in Philip’s eyes. Philip Broomby was a pleasant enough young man, but in two and a half years of studying composition he hadn’t produced any music worth mentioning. He would probably become an osteopath or something. The possible symphony seemed in reality rather unlikely, but it was a relief to Eamonn to know that if it did emerge, for all of Philip’s shortcomings, it would certainly sound nothing at all like Pandemonium IV.