Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“She’s stunning,” I said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“What does she think of your line of work?”

“ Mywork? I didn’t tell you? She’s our high soprano.”

I holed up in that attic and slept for two days. When I came back to life, we sang. Jonah took me to a converted packing warehouse two hundred meters from Brandstraat that Kampen’s circle leased for rehearsal space. There my brother showed me what had happened to him. He threw his cardigan on the bare floor and dropped his shoulders as if he were a corpse preparing for ocean burial. He rolled his head through three complete circles. And then, like the silver swan, he unlocked his silent throat.

I’d forgotten. Maybe I’d never known. He sang in that empty packing-house as I hadn’t heard him sing since childhood. Every nub in his sound had been burned away, all impurity purged. He’d found a way at last to transmute baseness back into first essence. Some part of him had already left this earth. My brother, the prizewinner, the lieder recorder, the soloist with symphonies, had found his resounding no. He sang Perotin, something we’d had in school only as history, the still-misshapen homunculus of things to come. But in Jonah, all stood inverted: more good in the bud than in the full flowering. He’d found the freshness of always, of almost. He made that vast backward step sound like a leap ahead. The whole invention of the diatonic, everything after music’s gush of adolescence had been a terrible mistake. He hewed as closely to a tube of wood or brass as the human voice allowed. His Perotin turned the abandoned warehouse into a Romanesque crypt, the sound of a continent still turned in upon itself for another sleeping century before its expansion and outward contact. His long, modal, slowly turning lines clashed and resolved against no harmony but themselves, pointing the way down a reachable infinity.

His voice sounded the original prime. He’d gotten past any emblem that others had made of him. In the United States, he’d looked too dark and sounded too light. Here, in the stronghold of medieval Ghent, all light and dark were lost in longer shadows. His voice laid claim to a thing that the world had discarded. Whatever this sound had once meant, he changed it. Our parents had tried to raise us beyond race. Jonah decided to sing his way back before it, into that moment before conquest, before the slave trade, before genocide. This is what happens when a boy learns history only from music schools.

His voice was the child’s I once sang with, back at our lives’ downbeat. But onto the boy’s free-ranging soar, he grafted a heavier-than-air flight all the more exhilarating, filled with fallen adulthood. What had once been instinct was now acquired. The range had pushed upward by urgent relaxation. Time was already grinding his sound down, pulling it back in to earth and amnesia. The dullness that all voices suffer simply by sticking around long enough already announced itself in his tone’s zenith. But his turns felt even surer, more wire-guided, as precise as radar, like a monk’s surprise levitation in his isolated cell.

He showed me his new voice, exposing a tender wound. He was like someone who’d walked away from an accident, transfigured. He sang for only thirty seconds. His sound had pulled in so it might fit anywhere and never be denied. It defined itself, like a split in the side of the air. Everything that had happened to us, and everything that never would, returned to me, and I began to cry in recalling. This once, he didn’t mock me, but just stood, shoulders dropped, tilting his head toward where that sound had gone. “You’re next, Joey.”

“Never. Never.”

“Right. It’s never that we’re after.”

He broke me down, all that day and the next. We worked for hours before he let me even make a peep. He stripped me back to the root, reminding me. “Drop everything. You won’t know how much you’re carrying until you set it down. Let your skeleton hang from the base of your head. You knew how to do this, years ago. A baby holds himself with more grace than any adult. Don’t try,” he whispered from above the battlefield. “You’re being too much. Be nothing. Let it go. Lower yourself into your own frame.” He opened me from the core until I stood, a hollow tube. How much work it took to find the effortless. We went for days, until I couldn’t hear him, but only a voice inside me, repeating, Make me an instrument of your peace.

On the third day, he said, “Breathe a pitch.” I knew by then not to ask him which. He brought me up from a trance of repose into simple resonance. “God’s tuning fork!” He aimed only for solidity, sustain. He turned me into a solitary menhir, out in a green field, his fundament, his bass, the rock on which he could build perfect castles of air.

Everything I knew about singing was wrong. Fortunately, I knew nothing. Jonah didn’t insist that I forget everything I’d ever learned about music. Only everything I’d learned since leaving our home school.

He bid me open my mouth, and, to my amazement, the sound was there. I held the pitch for four andante beats, then eight, then sixteen. We sustained long, whole tones for one whole week, and then another, until I couldn’t say how long we’d been at it. We cycled out each other’s notes, blending. My job was to match my shaky color to his exact shade. He tracked me through my whole range. I felt each frequency coming out of me, focused and shaped, a force of nature. We held unison pitches all the way out to tomorrow. I’d forgotten what bliss was.

“Why are you surprised?” he said. “Of course you can do this. You used to do it every night, in another life.”

He banned me from the group’s rehearsals. He didn’t want me thinking about anything but pure held tones. When Celeste or the other Kampen disciples — a Flemish soprano named Marjoleine deGroot, Peter Chance, an astonishing Brit countertenor, or Hans Lauscher, from Aachen — gathered in the warehouse, trying out their sounds in various ensembles, I was sent back to my upper room to meditate on C below middle C.

Now and then, Jonah let me out for breaks. With a fold-up tourist map, I explored my new city. Jonah gave me a sheet of data he’d written out longhand, to hand to strangers if I got lost. “Careful. Don’t jog anywhere. Don’t say anything in Turkish. They’ll still beat you bloody, just like back home.”

A hundred steps from our front door, I could be in any year at all. I determined to take Flanders in, and Flemish, too, the way Jonah taught me to take in my own voice. I absorbed the streets at random, wandering through a place that had been going downhill since 1540. Shards of Ghent stuck out from the past’s sooty mass, gems that history forgot to spend before it died. I loitered along the guild houses on the Koornlei or roamed the torture museum of Castle ’Gravensteen. I wandered into St. Baafs Cathedral by accident and found myself standing in front of the greatest artwork ever painted. In the unfolded Mystic Lamb, three times longer than me, I saw the mythic silence that my brother wanted to sing.

Nothing about this place was my home. But neither was America anymore. I’d simply traded the discomfort of citizenship for the ease of a resident alien. I mimicked the native dress, ditched my tennis shoes, and never spoke an unsolicited word aloud. From the distance of four thousand miles and eight hundred years, I saw what I had looked like to my native land.

After two months, we tried a song. We did Abbess Hildegard: “O ignis spiritus paracliti, vita vite omnis creature”: “O fire of the comforting spirit, life of the life of all creation.” Jonah intoned the words, and I joined him in unison. We zeroed out the motionless chant. Then we set out on thousand-year-old canons. Jonah wanted to relive the birth of written music, to reach out for the extreme of what we weren’t, a thing we ought never, in a thousand years, have been able to identify. But we identified, idem et idem. He needed me to match his sound, to fuse our voices into a single source, to revive, in this foreign place, our old real-time telepathy. From years of touring, our minds could still meld without a word. We still turned as tightly as schooling fish, not me with him or him with me, but the two of us, fused.