Sefa played the opening measures for her class without telling them what she was going to tell them. They listened. The recording was thirty-eight seconds of piano and cello: a fragment, not a full piece, the kind of thing that might be captured in a practice session. She had composed it in 2019.
A student said: I feel like I've heard this before.
Sefa did not respond to this. She let the recording run.
She had been teaching compositional memory for twenty-two years, which meant she had spent twenty-two years asking students where they thought an idea had come from. The answers were usually partial. Ideas came from other ideas, which came from other ideas. The chain never started where you thought it did.
A musicologist had sent her an email the previous month with an audio file attached. The message said: this is from a 2003 recording of a frequency some researchers track. I thought you should hear it.
She had heard it.
The recording predated her work by sixteen years. She had verified the dates through the musicologist's documentation and then through a second source and then decided to stop verifying. The dates were not going to change.
She had composed the piece in the late autumn of 2019, over six weeks. The first three weeks she had been trying to solve a phrase: a specific interval between a piano line and a cello line, a relationship she could feel clearly but could not locate. Then one evening the phrase had arrived. She had written it down without stopping and transcribed it the following morning. She had not changed a single note in the final piece.
She could not account for the gap.
She stopped the recording. She turned to the board and wrote the first six notes in staff notation (the opening of the phrase, the one she had spent three weeks failing to find. Her back was to the class. She was thinking about the evening in 2019 when it had arrived. She had been at her desk. The radio had been on) background, not attended to. She had not been listening to it.
She had picked up her pencil and written the phrase down.
She turned back to the class. She pressed play.
The piece sounded, to her, exactly as it had the first time she heard it.