1635: Music and Murder Read Free

about killing her softly with a song. The last song had me wondering what language she was singing in, there were so many words in it that sounded like English yet made no sense. Even the title was confusing: "I dig rock and roll music," yet it had not one mention of a shovel in it at all.
    In some strange way, the cabinet she sat behind was some kind of instrument, but it could not have been because it was so flat and narrow that there simply was not room for any kind of works within it. Nonetheless, it produced a most unusual sound. In timbre it was somewhat bell-like, perhaps like bells struck with soft mallets. That does not do it justice; suffice it to say that it was a sound I have never heard before.
    I took some comfort in the fact that if the Kappellmeister had been present he would have been gibbering; partly over the strangeness of what was being called music, and partly over a woman singing unaccompanied, albeit only in a tavern. In fact, that thought quite warmed my heart, and I was smiling when Marla returned to my table, claimed me and led me out into the evening.
    Friedrich, she found me shelter, and a place to work to earn my keep. But oh so much more importantly, she took me to people who showed me a new world, a world of music that I thought I had been barred from. First she took me to the school. It is not a gymnasium—they call it a High School, and all the children of the residents attend and learn arts and sciences. There is a professor there, a professor of music. Herr Wendell is a master in command of his art. He teaches these students, these youths, to play music, and to play it with passion. These youth, they play all manner of reeds and horns and drums. Everyone calls them a band. (They are not, however, to be mistaken for the "rock-and-roll" band.) Except that sometimes Master Wendell calls them a symphonic wind ensemble. He does not lead from a clavier, Friedrich. Instead, he stands on a platform in their midst, and by his gestures he shapes them as a potter shapes the clay. He was the one who showed me how our polyphony is changing slowly even now to a new style of music he called homophony, and began teaching me how to understand its forms.
    Friedrich, you will not believe what they can do, the flutes and reeds and horns they have! Especially the horns! They have finely made sackbuts—except they call them trombones, which I find to be an odd name. And they have trumpets and other horns of all sizes, all made with great artifice with an innovation called valves that allow them to play diatonic tones in all registers. They can even play chromatic tones in all registers! They are incredible! But most astounding of all is what they use in place of the harpsichord. Oh, Friedrich, there is an instrument called a piano, that is to a clavier what the finest flute is to the crudest willow whistle! All of this Master Wendell revealed to me over several evenings.
    Marla also introduced me to her friend, Herr Ingram Bledsoe, a maker of instruments, who makes some small instruments; some, as he says, "from scratch," meaning they are crafted totally by himself, and some from "kits". This is another changed word in the Grantville dialect of English that Herr Bledsoe had to explain to me. His "kits" are not baby foxes. He showed me boxes of instrument parts that had already been cut out from the wood and metal, and explained that he was able to buy these from other people and then assemble them into the instruments himself. He had several harp "kits", and some guitarras also. It seems to me that using these "kits" would rob you of the pleasure of searching out and selecting the wood, and bringing out of it the very shape you wanted. In their old world, however, it seems that the ability to accomplish things quickly was important, and there is no doubt that putting together the parts that someone else has crafted would quickly give you a finished instrument.
    He also repairs many of the instruments they