Xenomusicology

Xenomusicology is the branch of the Music Corps that asks one question of every people the Rangers meet: what is music to you, and if nothing is, what stands where it would stand? It is a school of the Academy in the ordinary way, constituted when the body of work grew large enough to need its own standard, and it holds the Corps' study of music across cultures and across bodies, in that order, which is the order the cases arrive in.

What it has to work with

The record's own instances are the branch's syllabus. Among the Chthonari, music and mathematics are nearly the same thing, so a tempo may be a proof. On Thavren, Ovruhn law is precedent chanted, and the Under-Song is a legal instrument before it is anything a listener would call a song. The Quiet-Built among the Krenyi take little interest in music at all, which the branch files as a datum and not as an absence. The Undersong Belt is worked from something closer to a score than a survey. And the Sentinel signal sounded, unmistakably, like music, to an officer the branch had trained.

The prefix carries no rank. In the Corps' usage xeno-, as in the Survey Corps' xenolinguists, names a comparative study, or a study of communication between beings of different physiology, and never a class of being: humans hold no privileged place among the sapient peoples the Rangers serve beside, and no one is called an alien unless they are unknown to the Star Rangers. A xenomusicologist's own music is one of the cases.

The discipline is comparative and it is patient. A xenomusicologist on a Survey rotation is not there to perform. She is there to notice when a people's arithmetic has a metre or a people's law a key, and to write down what she can show rather than what she heard.

The Slipwave project

The branch takes its novices on provisionally and puts each with a working ensemble for the time the study needs, a civilian one as readily as any, because the point is to learn how music holds a room before learning how it holds a people. In the branch's files that placement has a project name, and the best-known of them is the Slipwave project: a Novice placed in a three-person spacer-folk band on Eden Space Habitat's dock circuit, for the band's last year. To the circuit it was Slipwave, a band that mostly played dock-adjacent common rooms and never recorded a studio album. To the branch it was a file. Both records are true, and neither made the band a Ranger band; the two musicians who enlisted afterwards did so on their own account, and carry the Corps' musician specialization rather than the branch's study.

The Novice was Tissadelle Shepherd, whose Cadet standing the college confirmed at the project's end, and whose Season 1 opens on the general operations track with the branch's habit already in her: reading the space between the notes.