Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The three of us stand in this cold stone room, chanting. I don’t know the word for it yet, but I can do it as easily as breathing. We huddle in this pastiche of jumbled-up monasteries, this American treasure-grab, trapped inside a knot in the cloth of time as snarled as a fraying sweater, a Jew and his two light black sons, singing “Veni, veni,” Europe’s wake-up tune, sung to itself before it woke up and took over the globe. We chant softly but audibly, even as people filter into the room around us. I feel their disapproval. We are too free, in this museum of good breeding. But I don’t care what they think of us, so long as this thread of music continues to unravel and the three of us keep drawing it outward, around ourselves.

When we get to the end of the parchment, we stop and look. People are sitting in banks of wooden chairs that have been set up for a concert. Some of them turn to glare at us. But Da beams, rubbing our tufts of hair. “My boys! You know how to make it, now. The language of time.”

He leads us to the front of the block of chairs, where we sit. This is the reason we’ve come. The magic Mandelbrot was just a stopping point, fuel to get us here. All along, we’ve been heading toward this free concert, this stolen and rebuilt ruin of history.

Sunday, spring 1949. The world is older than I ever imagined. Yet each year that it has ever lived through hides out somewhere in an arch-lined courtyard. This room smells of moss and mold, lacquers and shellacs, things stored too long in linty pockets, brittle paper returning to reeds. I don’t share this room’s when, even though I sit in it. Only by some miracle that Da doesn’t explain to me can I see it at all. Every spot on earth has its own clock. Some have reached the future already. Some not yet. Each place grows younger at its own pace. There is no now, nor ever will be.

Now that a concert is coming, my brother stops jittering. He ages as I watch, and soon he’s sitting stiller, straighter, more eager than any adult. But he jumps up from his chair and claps like crazy the minute the singers walk out. The singers are all in black. Their stage is so small, they crowd in almost on top of us. Jonah leans forward in gladness to touch one of the women, and the singer touches him back. The whole audience laughs along with her, until Da’s arm settles Jonah back into the seat.

Silence falls, erasing all separateness. Then the silence gives way to its only answer. This is the first public concert I will remember ever hearing. Nothing I’ve already lived through prepares me for it. It runs through and rearranges me. I sit at the center of a globe of sound pointing me toward myself.

It doesn’t occur to me, at the age of seven, that a person might luck upon such a song only once a lifetime, if ever. I know how to tell sharp from flat, right singing from wrong. But I haven’t yet heard enough to tell ordinary beauty from once-only visits. I will look for this group throughout my life — on vinyl, then tape, then laser pit. I’ll go to performances in hope of resurrection and come away empty. I’ll search for these singers my whole life, and never come any closer than suspect memory.

I could track the group’s name down, in the museum’s records for that Sunday concert fifty years ago, twenty years before the idea of reviving the first thousand years of European music had occurred to more than a curatorial few. I could look all the singers up: Every year we pass through is hidden away, if not in a cloistered scriptorium somewhere, then in a bank of steel filing cabinets and silicon chips. But anything I’d find would only kill that day. For what I thought I heard that day, there are no names. Who knows how good those singers really were? For me, they filled the sky.

There is a sound like the burning sun. A sound like the surf of blood pumping through my ears. The women start by themselves, their note as spreading and dimensionless as my father says the present is. Keee, the letter-box slots of their mouths release — just the syllable of glee little Ruth made before we persuaded her to learn to talk. The sound of a simple creature, startling itself with praise before settling in for the night. They sing together, bound at the core for one last moment before everything breaks open and is born.

Then reee. The note splits into its own accompaniment. The taller woman seems to descend, just by holding her pitch while the smaller woman next to her rises. Rises a major third, that first interval any child any color anywhere learns to sing. Four lips curve upon the vowel, a pocket of air older than the author who set it there.

I know in my body what notes come next, even though I have nothing, yet, to call them. The high voice rises a perfect fifth, lifting off from the lower note’s bed. The lines move like my chest, soft cartilage, my ribs straying away from one another, on aaay, into a higher brightness, then collapsing back to fuse in unison.

I hear these two lines bending space as they speed away from each other, hurling outward, each standing still while the other moves. Long, short-short, long, long: They circle and return, like a blowing branch submitting again to its shadow. They near their starting pitch from opposite sides, the shared spot where they must impossibly meet back up. But just before they synchronize to see where they’ve been, just as they touch their lips to this recovered home, the men’s lines come from nowhere, pair off, and repeat the splitting game, a perfect fourth below.

More lines splinter, copy, and set off on their own. Aaay-laay. Aaay-laay-eee! Six voices now, repeating and reworking, each peeling off on its own agenda, syncopated, staggered, yet each with an eye on the other, midair acrobats, not one of them wavering, no one crashing against the host of moving targets. This stripped-down simple singsong blooms like a firework peony. Everywhere in the awakened air, in a shower of staggered entrances, I hear the first phrase, keyed up, melted down, and rebuilt. Harmonies pile up, disintegrate, and reassemble elsewhere, each melody praising God in its own fashion, and everywhere combining to something that sounds to me like freedom.

All around me in this room, listeners fly back into their pasts. I won’t see, until I’m much older, how they’re airlifted back before the Berlin crisis, nestled in their beds before the A-bomb, hiding as yet uninventoried from the numbering authorities, back before everyone has died, back before the unicorn lay chained in its pen of flowers, back before that now that never was, even with so many listeners needing to flee it. But I’m not brought back. Just the opposite. This music flings me forward, toward the speed of light, shrinking and slowing until I stop at that very spot where all my future selves put down.

It has been years now since I’ve been to the northern end of Manhattan. I say now, though my father taught me long ago, when my mind was still dilatable, not to be taken in by such things. Frisch’s Bakery has disappeared, deported, replaced by a video-rental store with a game-cartridge sideline, or one of those neighborhood stalls sealed up behind an accordion grate for longer than anyone remembers. Last time I visited, half a decade ago, the neighborhood streets were still in upheaval — this time from Jewish to Dominican — the turning tide of immigration, forever advancing on a shore it can never reach. Forty thousand islanders were settling in to their new, desperate nation, with Fort Tryon up on the colony’s old Heights protecting them from well-off Jersey and the ravaged Bronx.

And underneath the fortress, at the island’s very tip: that imitation, changeless garden. I’ve been up to the Cloisters only once since Jonah sang there in the late sixties. The image sickens me: a hodgepodge of bottom-dollar Romanesque and Gothic fragments, assembled paradise, a stone’s throw from forty thousand Dominicans trying to survive New York’s inferno. The ancient pasteup job must feel even more ancient now that the world has descended into endless youth. It must still draw its audience, the bewildered and dying, those who slip through their shell-shocked urban nightmare for a glimpse of a world before the crash of continents, when art still imagined us as one.