Before there was music there was silence. This period, unfathomable as it is to beings born in an age of Art, must by necessity have occurred and must by extension have been withstood, endured by a songless people for ages uncounted by beats and measure bars. The era of music, while not certainly of a greater duration, is certainly of infinitely greater essence, and although its earliest origins, the first birdlike lilts and whistles of a proto-human poesis, are forever lost (or perhaps reverberating infinitely through the cosmos), its culmination is only truly marked by the establishment of the Great Consort, an equally distant landmark in a history that now rings more of fable than of fact. But the existence and immanency of the Consort is evidence of its invention, as surely as a song proves a singer.
The instigator of this development was the doyen of a small broken consort---a small troupe of itinerant players led by a conductor-manager called their dean or doyen---whose repertoire was enacted on days of plenty before the cloistered courts of kings, and on days of famine on the cracked stones of a market square. Other such roving bands of players were common in every land---scraping the intestines of the goat with the hairs of the horse or pumping their breath through perforated canes in service of their still-embryonic craft---but only ever one such natural kind. Any ensemble that could afford to do so formed a whole consort, by which was meant a band of all the same instrument. The remainder, the broken consorts, comprised those tools which could be laid hands on.
History does not record the name of consort in question, and in any case it was not their musicianship which distinguished this peculiar broken consort from forgotten contemporaries; but when Fortune smiled and the bottle returned from the crowd tinkling with coins, the doyen did not purchase those instruments which might make of them a whole consort, but instead more and ever more diverse and disparate instruments, avoiding only those which were already employed. The strange assortment forged a novel coherence from their patchwork. This strange evolution may have been borne of simple perversity, but I believe it to be an early indication of the then-hidden ambition not to be pigeonholed, to make music that was in some sense total. To this end the doyen also invented new instruments of his own to supplement the assortment of cithrens and serpents.
Those most ancient of mathematicians and philosophers drew their conclusions not from the stars or from a falling fruit, but from the natural relationships and ratios of music, the operation of air in the reed, the vibration of the string of the lyre. The doyen, like any great artist, began by following Nature in the creation of his curiosities, and where nature left off he continued, each new invention requiring the conscription of further musicians to play them, growing the consort both in its membership and the range of its production.
The doyen's secret aim was furthered by the gift from a royal patron of a fabulous church organ, consisting of thousands of pipes and stops, gilded and engraved from the shortest double-piccolo to the cannon-like Grand Ophicleide. The donation was made with the thinly-veiled intent of halting the consort in its wanderings and tying them to the patron's own court, in whose pompous and artificial cathedral the organ happened to be housed. For any other consort, such patronage would be the gratification of a lifelong tutelage to fickle renown and the betrayal of public charity.
But even the innovations of the doyen could not persuade the crowned powers of the world to uproot their sovereignties and come to the consort. Such a prize of all the security and celebrity of a court consort was still a limitation, a compromise for the assured and indeed lofty, but finite, heights of one land at the cost of the yet-nonexistent, perhaps even impossible potential aeries of which the doyen dreamed.
The Doyen accepted the honor but not the constraint; the band must travel, even with an instrument that could never leave its chamber. Therefore, the chamber itself must move, or rather the instrument and its chamber become a single, motile unit. The doyen made the instrument his own, engineering within its labyrinth of pipes and pulleys innumerable contrivances even the organ's patron could not conceive. Like a wagon caravan crawling from city to city, the Consort would arrive and unfold like a great wooden flower, pouring forth its crew like bees from a hive to deliver their art and then to fold themselves up and travel on, occasionally taking on new members awed by the performance.
As the troupe grew, eventually the various instruments were consolidated. The carts and covered wagons were combined into one groaning edifice centered on the behemoth pipe organ, its juggernautical wheels driven by the same engines that pumped the bellows of her orchestrions and turned the shafts of her droning hurdy-gurdies, and the rumbling, pounding locomotion of the edifice on the world below it was as much a part of its continuous music as the notes from within its walls.
This early prototype may have resembled Schweighardt's engraving of the Invisible College, a castle on wheels the every beam and bartizan of which was an animated, functioning part of an ineffable apparatus. [This sentence is believed to be spurious.]
The Consort, or rather its Instrument, was too large to play any concert hall or bandstand, and so became its own container, inviting those who would hear its music to board it like a ship and wander its passages like a beetle traversing the convolutions of a nautilus-shell, or the resonant chambers of a violin. Indeed, the architectures and geometries of the Instrument were contrived to suit its function, and no stone was laid that did not serve a dual purpose of physically housing the Instrument and also comprising it, reflecting or amplifying the sound like the components of a fiddle colorfully named the Columns, the Bridge, the Architraves. These additions and expansions themselves required musicians-of-the-matter, adding to the consort's broken membership cartwrights and turners, furnace-stokers and clockmakers. These craftsmen were inducted into the Consort by the same quaint rituals and at the same division of pelf as the musicians, and indeed were considered musicians alike in stripe to the other players by virtue of their service to the Instruments, which through their own modifications became the Instrument. The most eminent figures in these far-flung disciplines were recruited with the urgency of securing a star soprano---masons, whose secret art was practiced both literally and figuratively, intertwined both in the ritualistic conduction of the Instrument; a windmill-builder of little renown was granted an absurd perpetual stipend for taking on a particularly tricky engineering problem concerning the all-important Centripetal Governor; the constructor of a great astrological carillion, which had been slandered in a popular pamphlet-ballad as a labor of the devil, was lured away from his comfortable position at some Southern court and, after descending into the bowels of the Instrument to accept an enviable posting at the head of a regiment of sapeurs, never heard from again.
Following the abolishment of the separation between resident and performer, the quaint distinction between performer and audience could no longer be accepted. The work of maintaining and playing the Instrument was so time-consuming, and the devotion so intimately tied with the sacredness of the music produced, that only the consort itself could be permitted to hear it. Those who wished to listen to the Consort did so by joining it, giving, in exchange for the privilege of hearing the music, their own participation in it. The training required was provided by the Consort itself, and of course most of the expertise imparted was peculiar and proprietary, having been developed by previous generations of apprentices who had made the same sacrifice, or been born aboard the instrument.
By this late date the last members of the original small traveling consort had long since perished, but this was of no more significance than the passing of a composer is noted by her concertos. At some point the project in the mind of the Doyens, who carried on from generation to generation as an eremitic order, progressed from the inclusion of every instrument to every possible instrument. (Naturally, more musicians were required.) Objects that already existed were granted the status of instrument as a solemn honorific. New consortiums of musical training were established to supply virtuoso performers of the flame or of the horse or of the ear-drum. Music was written for instruments sometimes before they even existed, in the assurance that the object would surely, eventually, follow. The Consort, encompassing within itself its dormitories and training halls, was like a city. Then, like a kingdom. And then---
(It is generally agreed that this is impossible. On this subject the consensus of the Consort's chroniclers is slowly shifting from the Consort being something that once existed but does no longer to being something that never really existed, the same historiographic shift which occurred concerning heroes and giant lizards and islands sunk in the sea. But the history of the Consort is chronicled by its historians in the first place only because its history, like everything within it, is a part of its music; this document itself is either heretical or deliberately planted as a grace note in its great melody.)
Authenticity was utmost; in order for the art to be Total, the musicians themselves must be devoid of distractions and attachments, free even from the knowledge that their project is in any way artificial. Devotees raised in the cult of the Consort were unaware of their status and purpose, that they might perform their harmonies without pretense, their every breath invisibly guided by the sheet music they followed unconsciously.
Then, the doyens, too, were subsumed by their Art, the obscure work of composition instead accomplished by providence, or shared among the musicians, or, just as likely, perhaps it always was so and the existence of the doyens was invented by those in service to them.
Today, the symphony of the Consort is still being played by its innumerable members. They play their parts on the knife-and-breadboard, the oyster-shell-walk, the purse-full-of-coins, and the comb-and-head-of-hair. Often the instrument is as simple as a single beating heart.
If you close your eyes and listen closely, you can hear the music.
