He went over several places in my orchestration where he hadn’t been able to tell what the hurried scrawl of my pencil had intended. A flat sign that might have been a quarter rest. Some unflagged sixteenths that unintentionally made a bar of four beats into a bar of seven. “And here,” he said, pointing at the score. “This note in bar twenty-three, did you and your lady friend mean this to be a B or an H?”

“Very funny, Professor.” I scowled. “I do think you’ve insulted the composer enough for one afternoon.” As even those only passably familiar with music knows, the lettering for musical notes starts at A and stops at G, but whenever one of my arrangements gets a little adventurous, Larry Vance says, “Wow, this chart is in the key of H!”

I gathered up the instrument parts and turned back to see Jurgen Haffner looking very perplexed, still waiting for an answer to his question. He said softly, “Nein, nein, I was not making the insult. I just can’t tell if this note is supposed to be a B or an H. In the previous bars you alternated flat sign, natural sign; this time here you have no sign at all. Is this H what you want?”

I didn’t understand and told him so. “Professor, that’s a B-natural.”

Haffner muttered, “Jemand hat mein Gehirn gestohlen! I am growing too old, they must put me away soon! You didn’t know that in German music we have an extra note?”

“An extra note?” I couldn’t imagine what he meant. Beethoven was played with the same notes in Hamburg, Germany, as in Hamburg, Alabama. “You mean, a quarter tone, or a blue note . . . ?”

He chuckled. “No, nothing that ungewöhnlich, that unusual. The note that you Americans call a B-flat, we call just a B. And the note you call B-natural, we call H. Our Führer has convinced himself this stands for Hitler, but of course it goes much further back. You never heard of Bach’s Mass in H Moll, that is, H Minor?”

I told him I knew it as the Mass in B Minor, but his mention of Bach reminded me of a question I had meant to ask him. “I have a question for you, Professor. The young woman who wrote Swing tried writing an arrangement of a Bach air and I’d thought, as a parting gift when I leave Oakland, I’d give her an arrangement of it for her to study, as a kind of tutorial. No one knows their Bach repertoire better than you. Do you recognize this melody?”

I have what most people consider an excellent musical memory. I took a sheet of blank music manuscript and wrote lightly in pencil, so that I wasn’t wasting the page, the theme Gail had been arranging for her “A Bach Ache.”