Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Throughout this my mother and I occupied ourselves without the slightest guilt with the used Bösendorfer of infinite nostalgia and a gramophone of His Master’s future voice. But as we whiled away the hours in the music room, in his study Father had became increasingly aware of the slight error which centuries of technical subterfuge has distributed throughout the twelve fifths of the keyboard, in order to make the remotest tonalities undistressing to the ear — and this began to annoy him as much as the fulsome, too wholesome tone color of Priam’s heritage.

One day when Father attended an afternoon concert in the Silbürsmerze park, he saw a composer — dressed more like a mechanic than an artist — get up from his stool and crawl inside the grand piano, where he continued to play. He loved the offense it gave to the office-heroes in the audience, but once inside the instrument, Father knew that they were at no cutting edge but back to the stringed gourd which had so unhinged Marcus. As much as he enjoyed for a few moments the mutilation of the classic, he found that his delight in the discomfort of the audience was gradually evaporated by the tonal dice games, an artform constructed almost entirely of hurt feelings, and he had his first premonition that there might come a day when Klavierland would exist no more.

It was not long afterward that he sniffed out a retired professor at the Monstifita Conservatory, one Dr. Janko, who before arthritis had curled his fingers like so much burned paper, had been at work on a massive keyboard in which all auxiliary vibrations had been preserved — four keyboards of thirty-two keys each, so that each semitone succeeded another, each sharpened sharp, each double-sharpened flat, were preserved in all their purity to their remotest diatonic regions, yet all these faraway places were still staunchly related to the key of C, so that the notes could not be made to disappear until the vibration of each string came naturally to an end.

The Janko keyboard was invincibly difficult to play, but it fully suited Father, who had perfect pitch but no formal training to forget. Of all Grandfather’s accessories, he found only the pocket hand exerciser from Dresden useful, though he still found occasion to use all the pedals, like all fortunate men whose antecedents have their place in every piece they undertake.

He knew then that if he would not play for a public, neither would he play for himself. He would play it for it self, allow the instrument to be the judge of him, frozen in a history that no one could locate. No performer, no composer, he would devise an instrument which only he could play, and so he performed without embarrassment a kind of random, dodecaphonic, dysphoric nonsense which gave him enormous satisfaction, in which no one in the entire countryside, much less our house, could share, nor was meant to.

There would be no evenings, merry or sober, spent round this instrument. No suitor would come to beguile his nieces. No strange hirsute visitor would call on him and ask him to sponsor a recital. No reviewer would get caught up in the finer points of explaining the intention of his composition. And he was grateful above all to realize that he would attract no pupils. He came to see that the Janko keyboard did not lend itself to those ineffable inner states which must elude the poor written word. However, as a weapon against artpiousness it had no equal. It was, indeed, the only way he could relax after training sessions and contact with the general public.

He began to see that this eclectic machine could be turned against the very class it captivated, and had he been interested in making such a thing as an aesthetic, he might return music to its military origins, and march against the sentimentality, stuffiness, and weepyeyed pale virtuosity by which the weak could make overstimulated women weep, a weapon which could be brought to bear against the cult of family values and civil society in general. It was shameful, no doubt, to work such idiots over, yet he couldn’t help indulging himself in this anti-bourgeois music par excellence.

His hands were about to fall.

“And now for some chow music, Herr Professor!”

And thus he began, like the mechanic, with a few sweeps of sentimental C-majorness, to gradually disconnect the phrases from their harmonic center, willfully losing its heartbeat in chattering thickets of sound. In this many-layered but non-propulsive music, the notes were no longer played singly, but looked forward and backward at once, sub-harmonic resonances separated by fifty-second pauses, rappelling into the lost world of the future. Then he opened the pipes of the old wohltemperer , solo to swell, transposing the heckelphone onto the quinte tromba , the tuba mirabilis onto the flûte à cheminée , the bois celeste onto the muted viole and corno d’amore , and finally launched into the double counterfugue, A Confutatis Tremendae .

“Enough, dayenu , enough!” cried the Professor, clapping his hands over his ears, but too stunned to move.

Father responded only by dropping the flats of his hands onto the lowest and highest octaves of Janko’s keyboard. The chords enveloped the tone-deaf Professor, on whom it produced goosebumps of a strange, indeterminate hue, and the dogs curled about me at the door — who had merely cocked their ears in semaphores of puerile curiosity at the sound of the Bösendorfer — now suddenly rose as one, totally alert. Sitting on their haunches in deep reverential respect, like a pair of tawny sphinxes, they took the notes into their bodies, those chords flying out to the east, a sound like that of walking on birds, away from the singing voice into the soul of the percussion people, dividing the hemispheres of the brain with Time’s Arrow. This reverberation seemed to go on forever, back to the original timbre, with no separation between wood and metal, past Marcus’s smoking braziers to the campfires across the river, which the barbarians could only extinguish by wounding themselves and dousing the embers with their blood. It was as if he had canceled out all those echoes buzzing in the soft dilettante’s sleep of ages and approached the Heraclitan ideal — registering the overtones of the original historical note. The style of styles did not rise or fall — it was neither calming nor exciting. Only the Chetvorah seemed to recognize it as the sound of primeval men breaking camp without a goal, a well-known accompaniment to a task with unforeseen consequences, a rasp of wood on metal, the real prelude before the etude, the sound of changing your mind. And when it finally seemed unendurable and the air itself was smeared with notes that would never die on their own, Father kicked out the damper as well as the sixth pedal, and as the tone began to subside, the two tiny negroes swung out from each side of the instrument, ringing in a little postlude of triangle, bells, and trapdrum — to remind us that the task of the barbarian is to civilize the men of science.

The afternoon disappeared into a mournful, barely audible triple pianissimo , at once sardonic and ethereal, a solitude which was itself almost art.

The Professor had drawn himself up in a perspiring, quivering glower, his tone hyperboreal.

“I believe, sir, our business is concluded.”

Father seemed taken aback.

“You’re going away, then?”

“Yes, I must see about the horses.”

“Very well, very well. Why must you. . Do you find it dull here?”

“You will excuse me.”

“Very well, then. I thought you would stay with us a little longer. A few hours. . It’s rather little, Berganza, rather little.”

“Sir,” the Professor stammered, his jaw jutting and rattling, “you ridicule me, sir, and have insulted the only comfort of my old age. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: people do not love you for what you know!”