✏️ Under One Roof

11. Eleven Tracks

This bonus chapter is dedicated to babysofia1234. Thank you!

Tegan took a deep breath and started the walk into town. She'd spent a good part of the morning looking at sheet music she had previously downloaded, playing individual parts on a software synthesiser on her laptop, and maybe trying out individual phrases on her uke or pan pipes. If nothing else, she had a new respect for the musicians of Franklin's Muse. These weren't the four-chord progressions that underscored most pop music, or a cheerful tune to act as a background to the lyrics; but actual compositions that she could imagine a Bach being proud of. There were inflected countermelodies, and inversions of repeated phrases buried in the background where most listeners might not consciously notice them. Whoever had composed these was clearly classically trained; and playing any part of this music would require well above average technical skills. It was easy to imagine that these guys could become one of her favourite bands, if they were actually capable of doing the music justice.

Now, once she had a good idea how the different songs could sound, she had copied them onto her phone. She felt that she was too inclined to other distractions if she tried to passively listen to music at her computer, and had instead decided to listen to it while walking around Morganston. She waited until she was a couple of minutes from home before she pressed play, if only because she was passing through several neighbourhoods where brambles from unmaintained gardens were spreading into the road, and she didn't want to be giving the traffic any less than her full attention if she was off the sidewalk.

There were nice parts of Morganston, and not so nice parts. Tegan was coming to the conclusion that her new home was in a small oasis of people who actually cared about their homes, surrounded by areas that were kind of scary. But it wasn't far beyond the rough part where she could find a cyclepath looping around the village, between fields full of corn and cows. The fences along this track were well maintained, if only because the cow farmers didn't want their livestock wandering off and the corn guy didn't want pedestrians taking a shortcut across his land, so Tegan could jog along a bright, open path with no obstructions. And today, as she listened to the opening bars of Melancholy and Ivory Towers, she decided that walking in the country was the perfect place for this kind of music. The score had told her what notes each instrument would be playing, but she had never expected to hear the guitars tuned down so that a chorus of clarinets carried the melody, evoking an impression of wind across vast, open plains. Nor did the sheet music tell her anything about the singing voices, one of whom was going up when the melody went down and vice versa. There was a whole extra instrument there, and it would have been impossible to sing that song correctly with only the music she had read. She'd assumed that the voices would follow the pitch of the guitar or keyboard lines, but instead they were new parts in the symphony. And although there was only one set of lyrics, she quickly realised that those words were split between three or four voices, coming in and out at different points. Did the whole band sing? She really hadn't expected that.

She hadn't decided, when she set off, whether she would follow the cycleway all the way across to Pine Ridge, where the station nestled against the outskirts of what looked like a larger town, or if she would keep following the path all the way around the outskirts of Morganston. But by the time she reached a dip where hikers and cyclists could follow a tunnel under the railway, she was lost in the music and not really looking where she was heading. Between here and Pine Ridge, the path would cross the railway several times; she'd explored it before, just to assess whether it would be possible to walk that way to the station on days when the bus timetable wasn't helpful. But with the music putting a spring in her step, she turned right without thinking and quickly found herself on a path she didn't recognise at all. There was a stone wall to her right now, with the railway rising above her on the other side, and the smooth surface underfoot was quickly replaced by cobbles as she went beyond the fields into what looked like a residential area.