Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

A thousand years of neglected music came of age everywhere at once in a dozen countries. Not just our group: Kampen, Deller, Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Hillier: an avalanche intent on remaking the past. Curators had championed dead music for decades, each with their own new versions of annihilated history to promote. And all that time, audiences had never treated these revivals as anything more than exotic wallpaper. Our new generation of performers was more razor-fine and aura-wrapped, more underwritten by scholarship. But that alone couldn’t explain why, for a few years, the Creator Spiritus had the nearest thing to a resuscitation it would ever get.

“I have a theory,” Hans Lauscher said in a hotel in Zurich.

“Careful,” Marjoleine warned. “A German with a theory.”

Jonah waved like a referee. “Easy, folks. Switzerland. We’re on neutral territory.”

Hans flashed the theory of a smile. “Why this rage for a deceased musical style that can mean nothing to anyone? I am blaming the recording industry. Capitalist exhaustion through the flooding of consumer markets. How many more Mozart Requiems can you make? How many Schubert Unfinisheds? The more we feed our appetites, the more appetite we have. We must give the buyers something new.”

“Even if it’s ancient,” Peter Chance said.

“All music is contemporary,” Jonah said. And that’s how he wanted us to sing: as if the world would never abandon this instant.

I remember the six of us, after a concert at the Castello di San Giorgio in Mantua, well after midnight in a warm May. The lights of the city threw the castle and Ducal Palace into enchanted outline. We stepped into a town square unchanged since the Gonzaga court stumbled upon the madrigal. We moved through the intact fantasy as through a stage set. “It’s a vein!” Celeste exclaimed. “We have a total vein!”

“Indeed,” Peter Chance echoed. “We’re supremely jammy.” As always, I was the only one struggling with English.

“How did we get here?” Marjoleine asked. “I trained for opera. Until a few years ago, I knew nothing before Lully.” She looked at Hans, our manuscript scholar.

He held up both hands. “I am a Lutheran. My parents would die all over again if they knew I was singing Latin Masses. You!” he said, fencing my brother with a finger. “You are the one who has corrupted us.”

Jonah gazed around the square, by the light of the Gonzaga moon, whose inconstancy he’d just that evening invoked in song. “Not my fault. I’m just a poor black Harlem boy.”

Peter Chance let slip a sound, half titter, half censor’s whistle. He gave his head a circumspect shake toward Celeste in the moonlight, decodable to everyone. Jonah returned the Cambridge chorister’s incredulity with his own, in American dialect. And there in the moon-muted Piazza Sordello, the penny dropped, in five different currencies.

“Are you having us on?” Chance sounded more Oxbridge than I’d ever heard him. “You can’t be serious!”

“You didn’t know? You didn’t know!” Some hybrid of amused and crestfallen.

“Well, I knew there was some…some ancestry, of course. But…you’re not black, for heaven’s sake.”

“No?”

“Well, not like, say…”

“We have counted up the numbers,” Celeste bragged. “We believe I may have as many— Comment dit-on? — arrière-grands-parents blancsas these men here.”

Peter inspected me: I, too, was turning on him. “And how many white great-grandparents, exactly?”

Jonah snickered. “Well, that’s being black, you see. Hard to say, exactly. But more white than black.”

“That’s just my point. How can you call yourself…looking the way you…?”

“Welcome to the United States.”

“But we’re not in the damn United…” Peter Chance tumbled headlong down the hill we’d made him. At the bottom, he sat in a dazed heap. “Are you sure?”

“Are we sure, Joseph?” Jonah’s smile was a calm Sargasso.

I turned toward a lost night, the last night I saw my grandfather. “That’s what it says on our birth certificates.”

“But I thought… I was under the impression you were… Jews?”

“Germans,” Hans said. He leaned against the rusticated walls, studying a thread in his shirt-sleeve. I couldn’t tell how many categories were on the table.

Jonah nodded. “Think Gesualdo. Ives. It’s a progressive idiom. Totally archaic. C’est la mode de l’avenir. ”

Celeste grabbed him under the arm. She clucked her tongue, bored. “C’est pratiquement banal.”

“C’est la même chose,”I offered. I’d die doing my own brand of Tomming. My very own.

The six of us stood under the Ducal Palace arcade. Peter Chance already looked at us differently. Jonah wanted to say something to break this group apart and lay waste to everything he’d made. But he’d already set alight every other place he might live. I figured the others would slink off in embarrassment, each to their own gens. But they hung tight. Jonah stood in the Piazza, a duke about to bid his courtiers good night. “I say we blame this whole early music boom on the English and their damn choirboys.”

“Why not?” Hans Lauscher grabbed the chance. “They’ve had the ownership papers for everything else, at one time or another.”

“A British plot,” Marjoleine agreed. “They never could sing with any vibrato.”

The evening’s exchange changed nothing, nothing visible anyway. Voces Antiquae went on singing together, more eerily synchronized than ever. From Ireland to Austria, we fell into what passed for fame, in early music circles. We were doomed to it. What Jonah really needed from that ringing, translucent sound was to be cut loose, unbranded, anonymous, as far away from notice as notice could get. But one last time, music let him down.

Since moving to Europe, I hadn’t kept up with the United States. I no longer followed current events, much less current music. I didn’t have time, given how hard I had to work to keep from dragging the others down. What little I did hear confirmed me; the place had gone stranger than I could imagine. Its appetite for law and order grew as insatiable as its taste for drugs and crime. I read in a Walloon magazine that an adult American man was more likely to go to prison than attend a chamber music concert.

In a hotel in Oslo, I chanced across an English newspaper headline: FOURTEEN DEAD IN MIAMI RACE RIOTS AFTER POLICE ACQUIT TED. I knew what the officers had been acquitted of, even before I read the lead. The paper was a month old, which only added to the horror of knowing. Worse could have happened since, and I’d never hear until too late. Jonah found me in the lobby. I handed the page to him. Giving him a newspaper was like giving Gandhi a stack of soft-core porn. He read the story, nodding and moving his lips. I’d forgotten that: My brother moved his lips when he read.

“We haven’t been away as long as it feels.” He folded the paper into neat vertical thirds and handed it back to me. “Home’s waiting for us anyway, anytime we need it.”

Two nights later, in Copenhagen, I realized why he’d dragged me across the world to be with him. We were in the middle of the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s five-part Mass, scattered across the stage, singing as hot as stars spun out somewhere in the gas clouds of the Crab Nebula. He was sending a message out to other creatures who’d never understand the expanse between us. For this, he needed me. I was supposed to give his monastic ensemble some street cred. Jonah had enlisted us all in a war to outshame shame, to see which noise — this shining past or the present’s shrill siren — would outlast the other.

We made some money, but Jonah wouldn’t move out of the Brandstraat. Instead, he sank a fortune into renovating the dive, filling it with woodcuts and period instruments that none of us played. Those panic spells and shortness of breath that had bothered him for years more or less disappeared. Whatever youthful terror they were recalling had been put to bed, outlived.