César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

In the end, biographies are literature. And what counts in literature is detail, atmosphere, and the right balance between the two. The exact detail, which makes things visible, and an evocative, overall atmosphere, without which the details would be a disjointed inventory. Atmosphere allows the author to work with forces freed of function, and with movements in a space that is independent of location, a space that finally abolishes the difference between the writer and the written: the great manifold tunnel in broad daylight. . Atmosphere is the three-dimensional condition of regionalism, and the medium of music. Music doesn’t interrupt time. On the contrary.

1956. In New York City, there lived a man named Cecil Taylor, a black musician, not yet thirty years old, a technically innovative pianist, a composer and improviser steeped in the century’s popular and highbrow traditions. Except for half a dozen musicians and friends, no one knew or could understand what he was doing. How could they have understood? It lay beyond the scope of the predictable. In his hands the piano was instantly transformed into a free compositional method. The so-called “tone clusters” that he employed in his evanescent writing had already been used by the composer Henry Cowell, but Cecil took the procedure further, complicating the harmonies, systematizing the atonal sound current into tonal flows, producing unprecedented results. The speed of it, the interplay of different mechanisms, the insistence, the built-in resistances, the repetitions, the series, everything, in short, that contributed to the turn away from traditional harmonic structure erected majestic, airy ruins, on the far side of any recognizable melody or rhythm.

He lived in a modest sublet apartment, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The place was rife with black mice, and there was a floating population of cockroaches. Doors ajar, the routine promiscuity of an old apartment building with its narrow stairs and its radios playing. That was the kind of atmosphere. He slept there through the morning and part of the afternoon, and went out at dusk. He worked in a bar that was part of the scene. He’d already made a record ( Jazz Advance ) for a small independent label, which hadn’t distributed it. A date to play in the bar, which for various reasons hadn’t worked out, had given him the idea of asking for work, and he’d been there for a few months, washing dishes. He was waiting for offers to play in places that had a piano. Given the number of night spots with live music in the city at the time, and the constant turnover of famous and unknown performers, opportunities were bound to come up. It was a time of renewal; there was a hunger for novelty.

He knew, of course, that because of the demanding and radical nature of his art, he could forget about being suddenly or even gradually discovered, his reputation spreading like ripples when a stone falls into a pond. He wasn’t that naïve. But he was perfectly justified in hoping that sooner or later his talent would be acclaimed. (There’s a truth here, and an error: it’s true that now he is celebrated all around the world, and those of us who have listened to his records for years, gaping in admiration, would be the last to question that; but it’s also fairly easy — almost too easy, in fact — to demonstrate that there’s an error in the reasoning. It could, of course, be objected that such a demonstration is no more than a flight of literary fancy. Which is true, but then it’s also true that stories, once they’re imagined, acquire a kind of necessity. A strange and rare kind, whose strangeness has an influence, in turn, on the imagined story. The story of the prostitute who distracted the cat wasn’t necessary in itself, which doesn’t mean that the virtual series of all stories is unnecessary as a whole. The story of Cecil Taylor calls for the illustrative mode of the fable; the details are interchangeable, and atmosphere would seem to be out of place. But how can we hear music except in an atmosphere, since the sounds are transmitted by air?)

The bar in which his first performance finally took place (it wasn’t strictly speaking the first, because there’d been one already, but Cecil chose not talk about it) was a dive where music was secondary, a background to waiting and drug deals. But drugs, and waiting too (they went together), were so intimately related to time that the artist felt he should be able to arouse some interest; all he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t cause a scandal, which was a pity in a way, because a scandal is an intensification of interest, but it wasn’t in his gentle, contemplative nature; and in a place like that, where people were risking everything, they would hardly be shocked by one more disruption of the dominant key. He prepared himself by imagining indifference as a plane and interest as a point: the plane could cover the world like a paper shade, but interest was punctual and real like a pair of neighbors wishing each other good day. He readied himself for the inherent incongruence of the higher geometries. The unpredictable clientele could provide him with a modicum of attention: no one knows what grows by night (he would be playing after midnight, the following day, in fact), and when tomorrow appears today, it never goes totally unnoticed. Except for this time. To his astonishment, this time turned out to be precisely “never.” Invisible ridicule melting into inaudible giggles. It was like that all through the set, and the proprietor canceled his date for the following night, although he hadn’t paid for it. Cecil didn’t talk to him about his music, of course. He couldn’t see the point. He just went back to his room.

Two months later, his erratic work routine (he’d gone from washing dishes to working at a dry cleaner) was enlivened once again when he agreed to perform in a bar, just one night this time, in the middle of the week. It was like the previous bar, though maybe slightly worse, with the same kind of clientele; there was even a chance that some of those who’d been present the other night would hear him again. That’s what he got to thinking (what a dreamer!), misled by his own repetitions. His music reached the ears of fifteen or so drunks, and maybe those of one or two women dressed in silk: small, black, beautiful ears, each adorned with a golden bud. There was no applause, someone laughed stupidly (at something else, no doubt), and the owner of the bar didn’t even bother to say good night to him. Why would he? There are times like that, when music meets with no response. He made himself an idle promise to come back to the bar some other time (he’d been there before), to put himself in the situation, or rather the position, of someone listening to music and knowing that it’s music, so that he could imagine what it would be like: the consummate pianist intuiting each note as he plays it, the slow succession of melodies, the reason for the atmosphere. But he never did; it wasn’t worth the trouble. He considered himself unimaginative, unable even to imagine the reality surrounding him. After a week, the mental image of this latest failure blended with that of the previous one, which left him feeling somewhat bewildered. Could it have been a repetition? There was no reason why it should have been that simple, but sometimes simplification works in tandem with complication.

One autumn afternoon he was walking home, mentally humming something that he would translate into sounds as soon as he sat down at the piano (he paid by the hour for the use of a Steinway upright in a music school, after the lessons), when he ran into an ex-classmate from the New England Conservatory. As soon as he saw and recognized him, the music in his head fell silent. The reality of that individual — son of Norwegian immigrants, big nose, little ears — contaminated the street, the cars, even Cecil himself with empirical details. They started chatting; they hadn’t seen each other for eight years. Neither had betrayed his calling as an avant-garde musician: the Norwegian was making ends meet by giving lessons to children; his constructivist pieces for chamber orchestra hadn’t been performed, even privately; he was still playing the cello; and he had spoken with Stravinsky. Cecil let him talk, nodding sympathetically, though he made fun of Stravinsky in private. He paid more attention when the cellist said, in conclusion, that the career of the innovative musician was difficult because, as opposed to the conventional musician, who had only to please an audience, the innovator had to create a new one from scratch, like someone taking a red blood cell and shaping it with patience and love until it’s nice and round, then doing the same with another, and attaching it to the first, and so on until he has made a heart, and then all the other organs and bones and muscles and skin and hair, leaving the delicate tunnel of the ear with its anvils and miniature hammers till last. . That was how he might produce the first listener for his music, the origin of his audience, and he would have to repeat the operation hundreds and thousands of times if he wanted to be recognized as a name in the history of music, with the same care every time, because if he got a single cell wrong, a fatal domino effect would bring the whole thing crashing down. . The metaphor struck his drowsy interlocutor as suggestive, if a little extreme, and provoked a vague reply. The constructivist was impressed by Cecil’s sibylline presence, his whispering, his woolen cap. Had he made something of his life, instead of being a nonentity, he would have recorded the meeting in his memoirs, many years later.