Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Voces Antiquae used two publicity photos, both black-and-white. In the first, some trick of the light made us all fall into a narrow tonal register. The second spread us over the latitudes, from equatorial Celeste Marin to sun-starved Peter Chance at the polar circle. Most magazines ran the second, playing up the group’s United Nations nature. A Bavarian feature called our sound “Holy Un-Roman Imperial.” Some overworked British journalist came up with “polychromal polytonality.” Flacks and hacks waxed on about how our multiethnic makeup proved the universal, transcendent appeal of Western classical music. They never mentioned how the earliest of our music was as much Near Eastern and North African as it was European. Jonah didn’t care. He had his sound, one that, with each passing month, grew clearer, finer, and less categorizable.

He and Celeste came home one day in the winter of 1981, giggling like schoolchildren who’d stumbled onto a dictionary of taboo words. She wore a garland around her temples, prim white daisies that her hair turned into tropical hothouse blooms. “Joseph Strom the First.” Jonah saluted me. “We’ve got a secret.”

“That you’re just dying to broadcast over the World Service.”

“Perhaps. But can you guess, or do we have to cue you?”

I looked, yet couldn’t believe. “This secret of yours. Does it sound like Mendelssohn?”

“In some countries.”

Celeste stepped forward flirtatiously and kissed me. “My brother!” I’d sung with her for four years, in ten nations, and she still seemed farther away than Martinique.

They went to Senegal for a honeymoon: vacationing in an imagined common origin. “It’s amazing,” his postcard from Dakar said. “Better than Harlem. Everywhere you look, faces darker than yours. I’ve never been so comfortable in my life.” But they came back shaken. Something happened on that trip they never spoke about. They’d toured some moss-covered coastal prison where the deeds had been transacted, the commodities stored. Whatever Jonah was looking for in Africa, he found it. He wouldn’t be going back anytime soon.

We made two more recordings. We won prizes, grants, and competitions. We gave master classes, did live radio, and even made occasional television appearances on the BRT, NOS, and RAI. Nothing was real. I lived in the sound alone, making sure only to catch all the trains and planes. My bass got better, simpler, more effortless, with month after month of work.

I reached that age where every six weeks, I had another birthday. I turned forty, and didn’t even feel it. It hit me that I’d given most of my thirties to my brother, as I’d once given him my twenties. Jonah had gambled on returning me to singing, and we made the gamble pay. I’d never be a transcendent bass; I’d started lifetimes too late. But I had become the foundation for Voces Antiquae, and our sound came from all six of us. Yet even as I reached my singing peak, I heard my tone wearing away, concert by concert, chord by chord. As doomed lives go, singers are not quite basketball players. But the eternity we make for fifty minutes every night lasts, if the wind is with us, for only a score of years.

It stunned me to discover I’d been in Europe for over half a decade. In the first year, I’d learned what it meant to be forever American. In the next two, I learned how to hide that fact. Then somewhere, I crossed an invisible line where I couldn’t tell how far I’d drifted from my inalienable birthright. All that time, we didn’t step foot on our home continent. There weren’t enough bookings to make a tour worthwhile, and we had no other reason to return. The country had named an actor to the helm, one who proclaimed it morning again in America and who napped most afternoons. We couldn’t go back there, ever.

I could follow conversation now in five languages and acquit myself in three, not counting English and Latin. I went sight-seeing when we toured, now that I no longer had to spend every waking hour vocalizing. Visiting dead landmarks became my hobby. Sometimes I saw women. In moments of unbearable loneliness, I thought of the years I’d lived with Teresa. Then being alone seemed more than complex enough. I was a forty-year-old man living in an adopted country that took me for a guest laborer, with my forty-one-year-old brother and his thirty-two-year-old wife, who treated me as if I were their adopted child.

Everything I had belonged to him. My pleasures, my anxieties, my accomplishments and failings: These were all my brother’s piece. So it had always been. Years would go by, and I’d still be working for him. There came a month when I needed a secret project or I would disappear forever into his accompaniment. The nature of the work made no difference. All that mattered was that it remain unsponsored, unaccountable, and invisible to my brother.

This time, my supplies were more modest. I carried around Europe a single A4 notebook, clothbound at the side, with eight blank staffs per page. On long train rides to distant concerts, in hotels and dressing rooms, in the dull, wasted stretches of fifteen minutes and half hours that ravage a performer’s life, I fished for tunes in me that were worth writing down. I did not compose. I was more of a psychic, a medium taking dictation from the other side. I’d hover with my pencil over the blank ledger lines and just wait, not so much for the prediction of an idea as for the revision of a memory.

Just as when I’d tried to compose in the States, everything I wrote down was some tune from my earlier days, changed just enough to be unrecognizable. If I studied what I wrote long enough, I could always find a source hiding in it, evading and yet craving detection. Only now, instead of the misery that this discovery caused me in Atlantic City, I felt an excruciating release in watching these hostages escape. Over the course of three slack afternoons, I labored over an extended passage that took me until I was free of it to recognize as a reworking of Wilson Hart’s chamber fantasy, the one that years ago had struck me as a reworking of “Motherless Child.” I’d sworn to him to write what was in me, and managed only to rewrite what had once been in him.

But the scribbling was mine, and had to be enough. My notebook filled up with floating, disconnected fragments, each of them pointing toward some urgent revision they couldn’t get to. The tunes spelled out the story of my life, half as it had happened to me, and half as I’d failed to make it happen. I knew that none would ever become the mystery it was after. All I could hope to do was stumble about, belatedly throwing open their cages.

Jonah often saw me struggling away. He even asked me once. “So what’s with the hush-hush hobby, Joseph? Business or pleasure?”

“Business,” I told him. “Unfinished.”

“You writing a good thousand-year-old Mass for us to do?”

“We’re not good enough,” I said. That was enough to guarantee he’d never ask again.

In the world we occupied, our future was fixed and we could do nothing about it. But the past was infinitely pliable. We were in the thick of a movement that made sure history would never be what it used to be. Every month brought a new musical revolution, constantly updating where music had come from. Supporting evidence for half the revolutions was scant, and the experts lashed into one another with the fury of the antiballistic missile treaty debate. Voces Antiquae was ahead of the curve on the newest developments in oldest performance practice. We sang one voice per line three hundred years after and five years before it was the hot thing. Jonah applied the ethereal sound to anything that stood still long enough for the treatment. He fully subscribed to Rifkin’s bombshell theory that Bach intended his sacred music to be sung one singer to a part. Jonah was convinced on sonority alone; no amount of documentary proof either way could alter his conviction.