Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I got through the piece all right, but afterward, I developed this profound allergic reaction to everything past 1750. I canceled three engagements, all big, blowsy nineteenth-century puff pieces. I managed to stumble through a large-forces staging of The Creation down in Lyon without tossing my cookies, but it was nip and tuck… When I got back to Paris, I happened by chance to catch this group from Flanders, a dozen singers, performing at the Cluny. I’ve never heard anything like it. Like landing after a long, rough flight and having your ears pop. In all those big-hall, 150-performer things, I’d forgotten what singing was supposed to be about… A thousand years of written-out scores, Joey. And we’ve only ever bothered with the last century and a half. We’re living in this one little wing of a rambling mansion… A thousand years! You have any idea how big a place that is?

Big enough for my brother to disappear into at last.

It’s taken me a while to purge my voice of all the tacky tricks and show-time shit I’ve been stroked for these last few years. But I’m finally clean. I’ve followed this group, the Kampen Ensemble, up to Ghent, and at last I have a worthy teacher again, after a long, lonely spell in the desert: Geert Kampen — a real master, and one of the most musical souls I’ve ever met. I’m just another reed in his little collegium, and we’re hardly the only group plunging into this stuff. Suddenly, the past is the coming thing. There’s a whole school up in the Netherlands, and one’s even starting back in Paris. Something’s happening. A whole wave of people reinventing early music. I mean the earliest. Just wait, Mule. This movement will hit the States in a few years. You guys are always behind the times, even when it comes to being behind the times! And once it hits, you’ll see: Nostalgia will never be the same again…

I’ve learned not to speak French in the Flanders shops, though German doesn’t go over a whole lot better. Even English doesn’t entirely convince people I’m not a Turkish “guest” laborer here to take coal-mining jobs away from the natives. I am, however, never safer than when the words are sung. I did manage to salvage the best of Paris and carry her up to civilization with me. Her name is Celeste Marin. She knows all about you, and we’re both waiting for you to get your ass out here so you can meet my new woman and hear my new voice. Better hurry. Not even the past can last forever.

I read the letter with mounting panic. Halfway through, I wanted to send him a telegram. My brother had achieved a level of success that almost justified the botched experiment our parents made of us. And on the verge of real recognition, he’d taken it into his head to walk away again, into some cult. My own disaster of a life lost its last shot at redemption. So long as I’d sacrificed myself to launch Jonah, I hadn’t entirely wasted myself. But if he bagged everything, then I was truly lost. I started to write him, but I couldn’t. I had nothing to say except Don’t do it. Don’t throw away your chance. Don’t trash your calling. Don’t mock Beethoven. For God’s sake, don’t move to Belgium. Above all, don’t marry a Frenchwoman.

I bought some recordings by the Kampen Ensemble, which I had to special-order. I listened to them in secret when Teresa wasn’t home, hiding them, like porno, where she’d never come across them, even by accident. The crumhorn-infested disks had an alien charm, like coming across an elaborate piece of wrought iron in a dusty store, something that meant life or death to some farmer once but which now had no function in the whole known world. Nothing in the thickets of complex counterpoint remotely resembled a hummable tune. The singers pared their voices back to dry points and reined in their phrases until nothing wavered or swelled. Everything we’d most loved in music was only hinted at, waiting to be born. I couldn’t hear what electrified Jonah. He was a master chef who’d perfected the secret of nuanced sauces renouncing the kitchen and taking to nuts and berries. It seemed a cheap escape. But then, I was a second-rate, fifteen-hour-a-week piano teacher and abortive composer, living off a factory worker’s good graces. In Atlantic City.

Alone during the day, I took the contraband records out and listened. The third time through the earliest Kampen Ensemble disk, an old Orlando Lassus song separated itself from the other chansons. “Bonjour mon coeur.” I’d known the tune from before it had been written. “Hello my heart, hello my sweet life, my eye, my dear friend.” And in the piece, I heard myself, at my first hearing. I backed down that narrow air shaft the wrong way, before our years of touring, before Juilliard’s prison practice rooms, before Boylston’s chamber choir, down below our earliest family evenings, each of us on an independent part. “Hello my completely beautiful, my sweet spring, my new flower.” In the song’s first four notes, I stood outside that stone room where I’d heard that tune for the first time. I’m seven; my brother is eight. My father has just taken us to the northern tip of the island, a medieval cloister, where singers unravel their amazing instant. “My sparrow, my turtle dove. Good morning, my gentle rebel.” And afterward, my brother declares, “When I grow up? When I’m an adult? I want to do what those people do.”

I didn’t know then who “those people” were. I didn’t know now. I knew only that we weren’t them. Hearing the song, I was filled with an urge to return to the Cloisters, a place I hadn’t been for decades. Standing in that place might spring some memory, take me back to where we were headed, help me find what was happening to Jonah. I asked Ter if she’d like to go to the city. Her eyes shone like hard candy.

“You kidding me? Manhattan? Just you and me?”

“And six and a half million potential mass murderers.”

“New York, New York. My man and me, loose in the city!” It had been some time, it seemed, since we’d taken a holiday. I’d dragged her underground, into the inner keep of my isolation, and she had followed, for music’s sake. But there was no safety, it had turned out, even in solitude. Especially there. “NYC! We’re going to start at Bloomie’s and head south. And we’re not going to stop until we find you a suit.”

“I have a suit.”

“A modern suit. A nice concert suit, with a nice flare and without any safety pins holding it together.”

“Why in the world would I need a suit?” Teresa shrank from my words, and the light went out. “I need to get shoes first,” I said, and she returned a little.

I suggested that after we’d shopped, we might head up to see the Cloisters. Teresa thought the place was a sporting arena. Her eyebrows bounced when I told her. “I didn’t know you were Catholic!”

“I didn’t, either.”

We spent the morning shopping in public, a compendium of my largest private hells. Teresa dealt with all slights as she always did, pretending that everything shy of direct aggression wasn’t happening. “What are pianists wearing onstage these days? What’s in style for concert attire this year?”

“Not this,” was all I could say.

Her frustration mounted. Anxious about making it to Washington Heights, I agreed to a hopeless, brown, double-breasted thing of no use except to further drain savings. “You sure? This is good, you think? You’ll be a babe slayer in it, anywhere you play. I’ll tell you that much, buster.”

We left the suit for alterations, giving me another week to bail out of the purchase and lose no more than the deposit. We took the Uptown A. All the while, hanging on her strap, Teresa sang Ellington and Strayhorn in my ear, like the most shameless out-of-town tourist. Feeling the bored smirks of every passenger in the car, I harmonized sotto voce.