Short story · 4 min read ·
The Siren Orchestra of Vallis Reach
The municipal orchestra of Vallis Reach tunes its strings to the town's monthly air-raid test, and after each concert the audience goes home humming the siren's falling note.
The Vallis Reach Municipal Orchestra had forty-two players, a conductor who had come from the coast twenty years before and never left, and a tradition that nobody could explain. Each month, on the first Thursday, the town tested its air-raid sirens at noon: a long rising wail from the old fire station, a shorter falling one from the church tower, and a cracked brass note from the pier that the children called the drowned cow. The orchestra played its winter concert that same evening, and before the first item the conductor raised his baton, and the whole hall waited, and then tuned to the siren.
Nobody had ever asked them to. The programme simply said *Tuning*, and the musicians, who were paid by the session, turned their pegs in unison until the open strings matched the falling note exactly, a clean sliding D that hung in the air like wet washing.
Ruth Pemberton had joined the second violins at nineteen. She was thirty-one now and had never once heard the orchestra tune to anything else. She thought it was a kind of joke, one that the town had been telling so long that it had become a form of prayer. Then, in the spring of her fourth season, the tuning went wrong.
The falling note came in at the right pitch. But the orchestra did not stop tuning when the siren did. The strings held on, and the wind section drew a breath and sustained a line of soft, pure tone that was not in any score, and the brass joined in quietly from the back, and the percussion started a slow pulse like a heart under a blanket. The sound was wider than the hall. It went up through the roof and out over the town, and Ruth, sitting with her bow lifted, felt the whole building lean toward it.
The conductor did not stop them. He stood at the front with his arms folded and his head tilted, listening. When the sound had grown so full it seemed to press on the walls, he raised his baton and brought it down, and the orchestra fell silent in one movement.
In the silence Ruth heard the siren again, very faint, from far off, falling to its lowest note. It did not stop. It was still falling as the audience began to stand and gather their coats, and it was still falling as they went out into the cold and the lamps came on along the promenade, and every person leaving the hall was humming it under their breath, a slow descending phrase, without knowing the tune.
The next morning the Vallis Reach Gazette printed a short notice saying the sirens had been tested, the concert had been well attended, and that the orchestra had been praised for its discipline. It did not mention the tuning. Ruth read it in the staff room and then asked the others what they remembered. Everybody had heard something. Some had heard the strings. Some had heard the siren going on for an hour after it had stopped. One of the cellists said that for a whole minute the hall had been completely full of a voice that was not singing, only waiting, the way a crowd waits at a station for a train that has not been announced.
The conductor was not in his office that week. The caretaker said he had gone up the coast to visit his sister. When he came back he rehearsed the orchestra for three days without once mentioning the tuning. On the fourth day he stopped them halfway through the first movement and told them to listen. They did. Through the old wall, from the direction of the pier, very faint, a cracked brass note was sounding a long, patient fifth above the tonic.
"That's the cow," said the conductor, quite calmly. "It's time we answered it properly."
The orchestra has been answering it ever since. The first Thursday concert now begins before the siren, with the players already tuned, and when the falling note comes from the tower the whole hall rises together and sings it back. The audience sings too. Nobody in Vallis Reach has ever needed a programme to know the words.