Covadonga opens the folder and two composers appear

The blue folder lay open on the music stand of Covadonga Salvatierra, music teacher and new conductor of the Valdelumbre town band. On the cover, written in black ink against a ruler, was a date: 8 September 1961. Below it read Marcha de la Fuente, processional pasodoble, a march in two beats made for walking, composed by Julián Requena.

Covadonga had arrived in the village in January. The band turned a hundred that autumn and she wanted to register its own works, put the archive in order and print a centenary programme with no approximate titles and no composers inherited by word of mouth. Marcha de la Fuente was the easiest piece to identify: it was played every 8 September behind the image of the patron saint, and every family in Valdelumbre could hum at least the trio, the more melodic middle section.

The hard part turned up when she opened the folder. Nuria Ferrer, the archivist at the culture centre, had found the record of the premiere and the composer's death notice. Julián Requena, the band's bandmaster for twenty-seven years, had died on 14 November 1958. Almost three years before his supposed pasodoble was heard for the first time.

Covadonga turned over the last sheet to see whether there was a dedication. Near the bottom fold she found a pencil signature, rubbed out without much conviction. Under the archive light you could still make out a tall M, a surname beginning with R and an ending in "án". It was not Julián Requena's name.

Mateo Roldán, eighty-one years old, a clarinettist and a retired post office worker, came in that afternoon for rehearsal. He had held the second clarinet stand since he joined the band as a boy. Covadonga showed him the cover, the date and the back of the sheet.

Mateo did not need to come closer to recognise the signature. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the hem of his shirt.

"Do you know who wrote this?" Covadonga asked.

"Today we start with the trio; the tempo got away from us on Sunday."

"Mateo."

"The march already has a name and it has been working for sixty-five years. Put the sheet away."

He went back to his stand and fitted his reed without looking up. Nuria closed the folder and carried it to the archive: the centenary exhibition had been at the printer's since Monday and she was not about to leave an original lying on the tall stand where the old scores went.

The next morning the two women went looking for the 1961 festival programme. The paper announced the premiere of Marcha de la Fuente, "a posthumous work by the unforgettable maestro Don Julián Requena". The town council minutes approved payment for the composition, though they did not say to whom. Nuria also found a letter from the band's committee to Requena's widow. They thanked her for authorising the tribute and promised to keep the maestro's name on the cover.

"The village knew it wasn't his," said Covadonga.

"At least the people who signed this did," Nuria answered. "What I need for the exhibition is to know who put the notes down."

The boxes of parts filled two metal cabinets. A part is the individual sheet for each instrument: the trombone sees only its own bars, the clarinet sees its own, and the snare drum waits between rolls. Nuria located the ones used by the youth band between 1959 and 1962. Several carried exercises copied out by Mateo when he was fifteen. The boy had written his name, his fingerings and his breathing marks with a very soft pencil.

Covadonga set the last sheet of the march beside those parts. Roldán's R began with an upstroke that was too long and doubled back on itself. His figure eight closed at the top first. His letter a ended in a small horizontal stroke. The three traits reappeared in the erased signature. Even the pressure was alike: heavy at the start of each word and almost spent by the end.

Nuria prepared an enlarged reproduction so the originals would not be handled again. The signature read "Mateo Roldán".

She also went back to the cabinet with the 1961 cash book. On the September page, between the payment for reeds and the one for the coach, there was an entry of a thousand pesetas for the composition of the march, collected by Basilio Roldán, day labourer: Mateo's father. A sixteen-year-old boy could not sign a receipt for the town council.

Even so, a pencil signature and a receipt in the father's name could be explained several ways. Covadonga still had to find the musician inside the music, and she found him in bar thirty-one. In the full score, the page where the conductor sees every instrument and which the band copied out at the time in sounding pitch, a note had been written, scraped out and corrected. The passage belonged to the clarinet. Underneath there was a very faint C sharp; above it, now definitive, a B natural. To any other musician it was an ordinary correction. To Covadonga it had a precise direction.

The band's clarinet was pitched in B flat: when the player reads a C, the audience hears a B flat, a whole tone lower. Transposing means changing the written notes so the sounding note comes out right. A composer working at the piano would have written straight into the full score the B that had to sound. Someone who had invented the melody with a clarinet in his hands could first jot down the C sharp he was reading and correct it afterwards to the B that was actually sounding.

On Friday she waited until the band reached the trio and stopped the rehearsal at bar thirty-one. She asked the clarinets for the passage exactly as it stood on their part — a written C sharp that on a B flat clarinet sounds a B natural — and then the same turn a whole tone higher, which was what the scraped note had said. Mateo used the old fingering before she had finished explaining it. The others tried it and complained: that written D sharp hardened the landing and forced a change of fingers in the middle of the turn. The good version fell on its own under a clarinettist's hand and left room to breathe right afterwards.

Covadonga announced nothing. She finished the rehearsal, waited for the musicians to leave and asked Mateo to come by the archive. On the table were the enlargement of the signature, two youth parts, the page from the cash book and the reproduction of bar thirty-one. She did not ask him to confess. She pointed at the R, the eight, his father's thousand pesetas and the note carried over from a B flat clarinet.

Mateo read the papers standing up. Then he laid a finger on the scraped C sharp.

"I used to try it out behind my father's storehouse," he said. "There I could go over the trio without anyone telling me to stop."

He was fifteen when he wrote the first section and sixteen on the day of the premiere. Julián Requena had taught him to read music, but he died before hearing a single note of the march. The town council of 1961 only paid for, and only printed in the programme, works signed by musicians with an official qualification. Mateo had no qualification, no contract and no age to argue the rule. The band's committee wanted to premiere new music during the procession and to say goodbye to the maestro who had trained half the village.

The deal was struck between the committee, the Requena family and the mayor. The pasodoble would carry the dead maestro's name; Mateo would get the money without appearing in the programme. For the older men it was a tribute and an administrative solution. For him it was also a way of hiding a work he was afraid would be turned down for having been written by an apprentice.

The signature on the back was his one act of disobedience. He wrote it the night before the premiere and tried to rub it out when the band's president found it. It never disappeared completely. Mateo stayed at second clarinet because from the second stand nobody looks at you. He had played his own pasodoble every September for more than six decades.

"Why didn't you say so when the rules changed?" Nuria asked.

"They let me play when the council didn't want my name," he said, and sat looking at his reed. "After that there was no one left to tell."

Covadonga took out the registration form. She proposed keeping the title, naming Julián Requena as the maestro being honoured and registering the music to Mateo Roldán. Mateo refused a photograph in the programme and any speech during the procession. He did accept a line explaining the 1961 agreement, as long as the Requena family's authorisation appeared as well.

Clara Requena, the maestro's granddaughter and the village pharmacist, knew about her grandmother's letter and brought her written authorisation that same afternoon, on one condition: that the programme should say both things, who composed it and who was being honoured.

At the next rehearsal Covadonga explained why she was going to change the cover. The euphonium player, who had been playing it for forty years, said that in the procession people asked for maestro Requena’s march and that under another name it would not be the same one; Mateo told him to play it just as loud. A young clarinettist asked Mateo for the fingering of bar thirty-one; he marked it on her part and added where she should breathe.

The centenary programme went to the printer's with two lines under the title: "Music by Mateo Roldán, 1961. Dedicated to maestro Julián Requena". Before the following Friday's rehearsal, Covadonga stapled the corrected cover to the thirty-two parts and left Mateo's open at bar thirty-one.