Polyphony

ovely

fic

A hand went up somewhere among the tenors. “Here, Superintendent, I thought the rules said we had fifteen seconds.”

“That’s right,” said McGough.

”Well, this here madrigal, it’s got to be longer than that, right? I mean, this is already fifty pages, and then it says at the end, ‘volume one of Remembrance Of Things Past (The Madrigal), subsequent volumes can be ordered from the publisher …’”

“We could cut out some of the fa la las,” said someone else, hopefully.

“Nonsense,” said McGough. He would not tolerate such mutiny. “We’ll just have to sing it as fast as we can.”