The spring concert's program had been set since February, in the way of school programs, which is to say it had been argued about since February in the friendly, total manner of musicians, for whom a program is a philosophy with timings. Weber conducted. The orchestra had grown over the year — two scholarship students besides Xavier in the strings, a new oboist whose sound had rearranged the woodwinds' whole season — and the program's architecture placed the Elgar slow movement at its center, not as a concerto excerpt with a soloist elevated, but as the orchestra's own piece, with the cello's line rising out of the ensemble the way the movement asks it to, less performed than disclosed. It was the movement Xavier had auditioned with. Weber had chosen it for that reason, though he gave the section a different one — that the school orchestra had the strings for it this year, which was also true — and the two truths rode together through the rehearsals the way Weber liked his truths to travel, in convoy.
The tempo question, which the visiting cellist had put her finger on in December, became the rehearsals' quiet spine. The movement as Xavier had played it for a year — in the audition, in the masterclass, in lessons — carried the bad hour in its pulse: a held-back, guarded tempo, the tempo of a person keeping something in check. It was, Weber said at the first rehearsal, perfectly accurate and perfectly safe, and the movement was neither of those things in its heart; it was a song a man wrote when he stopped being careful, and it had to be sung by someone willing to be caught singing. He did not say: play it like the year went well. He said: give me two more beats of room in the phrase, and let the orchestra breathe where you're holding. They worked it in the way orchestras work, section by section, the cellos first, then the whole string body, then everyone, and Xavier practiced at home in the mornings with the metronome his father had given him at Christmas — a wooden pyramid of the old kind, whose tick had the authority of furniture — set two beats slower than safety, and then, across the weeks of April, two beats slower again, until the phrase had the room in it that Weber wanted, until the held-back thing in the tempo had somewhere to go and went there, which was into the music.
The section leader, the senior with the metronome conscience, was playing her last school concert, and the section had prepared for her the observances sections prepare: a card signed in rosin-dusted hands, a speech at the last rehearsal that she cut off at ninety seconds by raising her bow like a gavel. She took Xavier aside afterward, in the instrument room, among the lockers, and performed the section leader's final office, which is the transmission of unwritten knowledge. She told him the hall's cold spot (third stand, left, in May, a draft from the stage door). She told him which of the orchestra's traditions were real and which were hazing in formal dress. She told him he had the stand next year if he wanted it, and that wanting it was allowed, and that the section would vote the way sections vote when the playing is the loudest voice in the room. He thanked her with the family's precision. She said: you know, you're nothing like the file. It was said as the highest available compliment, section to section, and he received it as such, because it was true in the only tense that mattered to either of them: the present, in a room full of instruments, with a concert in nine days.