Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

We were a synchronized underwater ballet. Ten hands worked the air, shaping the wayward notes, waving like a Flanders wheat field in the wind. Celeste and Marjoleine especially needed to dance, the arc of the music and the line of their muscles weaving and meeting. Peter Chance, who’d spent his choirboyhood in the chancel of King’s and had stayed on in Cambridge when his voice broke, delighted in the newfound freedom of movement the group allowed him. Hans Lauscher did at least wag his shoulders, which, for a Rhinelander, was almost Swan Lake. Even Jonah, who’d once shamed Mama into keeping still when she sang, and who, during his lieder years, had made unholy drama by standing dead stationary in the crook of the piano, now turned fluid. He crooked his knees and curled forward into the top of his phrase, ready to mount up into empty space and keep on climbing. The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

When we were hitting on all cylinders, Jonah blessed us. Tied to his omnipotent tenor, we might travel anywhere, run any theft. But when we were off, falling back to earth in a fiery ball like Icarus, his patience grew as thin as a snake’s skin. Then six bruised egos spent hours trying to coax the damn carcass back to life again.

We were like a commune or an infant church: from each according to her abilities. Hans was our font of Teutonic scholarship, a walking manuscript library on a par with Vienna or Brussels. Peter Chance, who’d read Renaissance history at King’s, was our source on performance practice. Celeste served as articulation coach, softening, closing, and relaxing our vowels while tightening our intonation and polyphonic textures. Marjoleine was the verbal interpreter, glossing sense and phrasing stress points in any language we sang in. I did the structural analyses, finding how best to juxtapose long note values and rapid passages or bring out the subtle undulations of pulse.

But Jonah ruled over us all. His face, our focal point, filled with driven will. Our years apart weren’t enough to account for everything he now knew. All I could figure was that he hadn’t learned it. He remembered, resurrecting that dead world as if it had always been his. Through Kampen, he’d acquired a grasp for early idiom. He knew, within a week of reading a piece, how best to find its otherworldly hum. He could get at the universe hidden in any work, find the meter of a line, play the text, harmony, and rhythm off one another, revealing the message that existed only in the tension among them. He led us through a thicket of counterpoint to those moments of convergence that life denied him.

He shaped the group like a Kyrie. He delayed our first appearance. We were ready to sing for months before we actually did. Each singer went on working outside the group. Marjoleine ran three church choirs. Celeste blasted out background vocals in Europop radio anthems. Hans and Peter both sang and taught. Jonah took on assorted gigs, performing early music, especially with Geert Kampen, whose Kampen Ensemble, now veterans, were our North Star. But the six of us, together, held back for a last bar, reluctant to lose this moment when we were the only ones who knew the ring of possibility.

We sang for Kampen, in the chancel of St. Baafs. The church was deserted except for a few startled tourists. It felt like singing for Josquin himself. When we were done, Mr. Kampen sat in his choir stall, his shock of white hair falling over his forehead. I thought he’d taken offense at some turn in our interpretation. He just sat there, for five whole lento measures, until, behind his tiny granny glasses, the man’s eyes dampened. “Where did you learn this?” he asked Jonah. “Surely not from me.” And over my brother’s horrified objections, he proclaimed, “You must teach me now.”

Voces Antiquae debuted at the Flanders Festival in Brugge and followed up at the Holland Festival in Utrecht. We made our initial beachhead in the fifteenth century — Ockeghem, Agricola, Mouton, Binchois, a motley mix of regional styles. But our great signature piece was Palestrina’s Mass, Nigra sum sed formosa, a private joke between Jonah and me. It’s a Daley-Strom thing; you wouldn’t understand. Jonah insisted we perform everything from memory. He wanted the danger. Soloists play without music all the time. But if they lose themselves, they can swim up alongside their own fingers, and no one but the fellow in row four with the pocket score is the wiser. With ensembles, each mind’s memory map must be identical. Lose yourself and there’s no return.

Written music is like nothing in the world — an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section. While you do this, you, you, and you do otherwise. The score does not really set down the lines themselves; it writes out the spaces between their moving points. And there’s no way to say just what a particular whole sums to, short of reenacting it. And so our performances rejoined all those countless marriage parties, births, and funerals where this map of moving nows was ever unrolled.

In the world lines traced out in these scores, Jonah at last came into his own at-one-ment. His six voices cartwheeled around one another in unleashed synchrony, each creating the others by supplying their missing spaces. We sang the Palestrina, a piece that, by the kind of rough estimate Da loved, had been performed on the order of a hundred thousand times. Or we brought to life the Mouton manuscript Hans Lauscher discovered, which hadn’t sounded a peep since its first performance five hundred years ago. In both cases, we slipped alongside every performance that had happened or was still to come.

That’s why Jonah insisted that we surrender the safety of the page. We lived, ate, and breathed the printed instructions until they vanished, until we composed the written-out invention afresh, in the moment of our repeat performance. He wanted us to stand onstage, open our mouths, and have the notes just there, like a medium possessed by the soul she channels. He had us walk out from as many entrances as possible, in our daily clothes, as if we’d just bumped into one another on the street. This was still the era of black-tie concert dress. Jonah had donned monkey suits for years. The biggest shock available to him was the ordinary. We just appeared, as impromptu as the gift of tongues. We stood, scattered across the floorboards, as far from one another as we could get, like some multiple-body physics problem. That gave us maximum voice separation, the fullest possible depth. It made blending, precision attacks, and releases that much harder to pull off, and it left us, each night, courting disaster. But that space turned us into six soloists who just happened to align into a single crystal.

The sound we made glinted like the best hedge against all debased currencies. Jonah wanted every interval redeemed. Every resolved suspension shone out like tragedy averted; every false relation was the drift of a soul in agony; every tierce de Picardie delivered a life beyond this one. A reviewer in De Morgen, still reeling from the effect, expressed the strongest reservation leveled against us: “If anything, the sonority suffers from relentless divinity. Too many peaks; not enough valleys.”

Even that barb was laced with gratitude. Everywhere, for an instant, people wanted to be saved. Our sudden popularity surprised everyone except Jonah. Within a year, every festival in Europe with an arts subsidy wanted us. In that most select of dying worlds, we were the flavor of the hour. Our recording of the Palestrina Masses on EMI — a label that could have bought and sold a hundred Harmondials — won a pair of awards and sold enough copies to pay the rent on Brandstraat through the next century.