Mark de Silva - Square Wave

On late afternoons turning into night, as an undergraduate in the city he used to sit on the benches circling the fountain, reading Sidgwick or Hobbes, even Grote, under the statue’s growing shadow. He felt he knew it better by that shadow, in fact, than by direct sight. The piece had never stirred anything in him, so he’d spent hardly any time face to face with it: the eyes long and drawn and faraway, the chin short and wide, the pose languid. All the interest, for Stagg at least, was shunted into one feature: the head’s being turned off to one side, as if something had sounded in the distance.

Only this marble man’s destruction, and his ongoing reconstitution, had given Stagg a reason to consider him properly, to scrutinize him as a whole, in his own right, and not merely as an element of the square. The chance to study his lines, his translucent skin, at this distance, standing within the now-dry fountain, all of this depended on his having been exploded.

He considered whether the original could truly be made to reappear, whether an entropic event could be run in reverse, an object unexploded. The viewer’s eye measured the conglomeration of marble shards, their discrete totality, against this ideal, of a statue hewn from a single slab, which Stagg seemed to grasp more fully now, in memory, than he had on any of the occasions he confronted the original in experience; those times he had stood in front of it, then sat under it, sometimes looking across the fountain, over his shoulder, as the statue itself did, though his mind was still mulling the books, seeking in them too discrete totalities, parts and wholes.

A sound. This time not a squealing but an effervescing of notes, rising, ringing, locking together in unfamiliar combinations, not clashing exactly, but making the ears skeptical. If the tones didn’t keep coming that way, and if he didn’t hear the rhythm section enter, he would have assumed a mistake. There was a kind of absolute strangeness to it, or something just short of that. The work of an undiscovered culture maybe.

Stagg drifted toward the tones, not yet ready to call them music. He’d come out, at Renna’s request, to see Larent and his new band, which this must be. But he was still thinking of the statue. The legs alone, in their rough state, seemed already to carry a charge different from the one he recalled, one that, no matter how exacting a job was done, he thought, could never be brought entirely into line with the original’s. But if the shifting by millimeters here and there; the discreet interpolation of foreign marble; the glues and plasters used to hold the exploded materials together as one; and the various hairlines that would invariably remain; if all of this altered the tone of the original, why must that be a shortcoming?

The new valence, he thought, must make a more complicated impression, and for that it might well have greater heft. Doubtless the original had to guide the reconstruction. That didn’t mean it was any measure of the finished piece. As objects of art, they were two and not one.

Through the scarred doors of The Round, then, and into a welter twice over, bodies and pitches teeming. The music — it was music now — had filled out. The crowd, mostly clutching drinks, appeared a congealed mass, lacking the moving parts that might make for passage through to the back, where Larent was performing, and Renna was listening, raptly, he assumed.

The short leg of the L-shaped bar, facing out onto the courtyard, was mostly vacant, as the people crowded into the long leg to see into the cubed space beyond. But the sonic whirl was enough for Stagg. He stood at the end of the short leg, near the window, with his hands on the bar. When the bartender came he simply pointed at a sign describing the well scotch for the night. It was cheap, and tasted it: thin, sour, vulgarly medicinal.

The snack bowl overflowed with a house medley. Cheetos, Chex, Fritos, corn nuts, Lay’s, pretzel sticks, and probably some other things. Any one of these made a passable nibble, but the mix was perverse, possibly by design, as it was suitable only to those well past drunk. He’d had nothing to eat since morning, only champagne and vodka. He finished half the bowl in five handfuls, slowing the alcoholic nausea he knew to expect.

Larent had moved on substantially from what Stagg had heard from him last, that night at the little café. Gone was the precision counterpoint. In its place, a diffuse harmony driven by piano and guitar: arpeggiated, key-revolving, and set in a strange motion. The progression seemed of indefinite length; or if it had a length, Stagg couldn’t mark it, no better than a tone row of Schoenberg’s. Structure was tacit, more felt than grasped. The percussion, mainly toms, bass, shimmering cymbals, surfaced in low rolling flourishes, barely fixing a rhythm, which was left to the contrabass — Larent’s, presumably. He bowed a stream of half notes, then dotted half notes. It was the tether the ear sought in the driftlessness, grounding the harmony.

Gone, along with the counterpoint, was the ordinary diatonic scale itself. Or if not gone exactly, reformed. Except for the octave, the newly untempered notes had all been nudged up or down, so what remained was almost a diatonic scale, but not, a shadow.

The corresponding chords were shadows too, seeming just off target to the ear, precisely displaced, which retarded their uptake. The result was a music apprehended retrospectively, the chords’ well-formedness established, their musicality unlocked, only after they’d given way to others that raised puzzles of the same order. The ear had no rest, and the struggle wasn’t his alone. The faces along the corridor leading to the cube showed a blankness — furrows and squints self-consciously held in check — or else, imperfectly masking this, a prehensile quarter-smile attesting only to a knowledge unpossessed.

Many registers above, a lofted figure, aptly skewed, glided above the harmony before drifting down to mingle with its pitches. Quickly it returned to those first heights and fell again, a dissolving line that varied with each descent, adjusting to the drones of the new key.

Stagg cleared a second bowl of the mix. The powdered cheeses disagreed with the peat rot of the whiskey. He could feel a heat behind his eyes, the first trembles of his eyelids. The best of his night was already past. The sickness had caught him. He’d be both drunk and hungover the rest of the night, and the bowl would have played its part.

The music thinned and the joints of the piece emerged. The chords clarified around their central intervals, the fifths and thirds and sixths. There was a sonorousness to them, foreign, ineffable. The music had a dual aspect, he thought, like a Necker cube. Heard one way, it was alien beyond exotic, a deformation. Heard another, there was a sort of primordial solidity to it, an exactitude that made the tempered diatonic scale seem not a rival but only a coarsened derivative. The more Stagg’s ears probed these pure intervals, the more this second aspect fixed itself. The sense of skew fell away; the factitious and the real switched places.

The drums petered out with the guitar, leaving the keyboard and bass to negotiate a few more chords, then a few fifths, then a few unisons, on their way to Bb, the tonic, a traditional resolution to a maundering piece.

A crescendo of claps was the last of the percussion, though it lacked the tentativeness that might have saved it from vulgarity. The unconstructed response, he thought, for anyone outside the vanguard of composition, was a ruffled silence. And the too-large eyewear, the too-small clothing all around him, did nothing to convince him the audience was any better placed than he was to grasp the night’s singularity, seeing how far this was removed from the references they could plausibly have. MBV, maybe, or Earth.