Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

That leaden pointlessness fell away when I practiced. Still, I hated myself for letting it go, even for a minute. I don’t know how Jonah survived. We saw little of each other once he started the college track. He needed me less. Yet when we strolled back through Morningside Heights at the end of a day, he’d recap his hours, irritated that I hadn’t been there to experience it all with him firsthand. On weekends, as we bummed around the music shop on 110th, he could go exultant again over nothing, launching into the horn blare from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, expecting me to be right there, in tempo, a third below him in the second horn, no later than the score’s marked entrance, as if no one had died.

Juilliard was so big, even Jonah shrank in it. The cafés around school babbled like a musical UN. Until Juilliard, we’d only noodled away at little Dittersdorf duets. Now we’d landed somewhere in the middle risers of an international Symphony of a Thousand.

There were even a couple of Negro students. Real ones. The day I saw my first — a wide, preoccupied grad with dark glasses and a sheaf of scores under his arm — I fought the urge to greet him like a long-lost cousin. He caught me out of the corner of his eye and called, “Hey, soldier,” flicking me a two-fingered salute of shared, unlikely membership. White people never knew for certain. They took us for Indian or Puerto Rican. They never looked. Blacks always knew, for the simple reason that I looked back at them.

The second time I saw the man, he stopped. “You’re Jonah Strom.” I corrected him. “Heaven’s sake. There’s two y’all?” He was from the South, and harder to follow than even János Reményi. He was a bass named Wilson Hart. He’d gone to a black college in Georgia, a state I’d never even considered before, where he’d graduated in teacher training. “Only line of work I thought a black concert bass could follow.” A visiting professor had heard him sing and persuaded him to think otherwise. Wilson Hart was not yet convinced.

I could hear, even in his speaking voice, what resonance the man had. But Wilson Hart had a dream that went beyond singing. “Tell you what I’d do, if the world was well?” He opened the portfolio he always carried under his arm and spread the cream-colored pencil-filled staffs in front of me, right there in the corridor. I sounded out the notes, notes this man had written. However derivative and dreamy, they had riches.

He wanted to compose. It filled me with wonder, to my lasting shame. Yes, because he was a member of my mother’s race. But more because he was living, here, talking to me. I stood looking out over my own life. Composing had never occurred to me. New music was every minute streaming into this world, from every quarter. We could do more than channel it. We could write our own.

Wilson Hart looked at me like God’s spy. “They always asking you how a black man got interested in this line?”

“We’re mixed,” I said.

The word came back to me, turned around in his face. “Mixed? You mean like all mixed up?” He saw me die. “That’s okay, brother. Isn’t a horse alive who’s a purebred.”

Wilson Hart became the first friend I ever made all by myself. He’d smile from down long hallways and sit with me in crowded concert halls. “You stop crucifying me with this ‘Mr. Hart’ business, now. Mrs. Hart’s the only one I’m gonna let call me Mr. Hart, once I find her. You, Mr. Mixed, you call me Will.” When he passed me in the corridors, he’d pat his portfolio of freshly penciled music. It was our private conspiracy, this stream of new notes. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. The thrill of his singling me out to stand with him oppressed me worse than any racism.

Will and Jonah finally met, although I was in no hurry to introduce them. They were like fur and fire. Jonah had exploded with the avant-garde, the making and unmaking of new freedom. The first time Jonah heard the Second Viennese School, he wanted to round the rabble-rousers up and execute them. The second time, he just sneered. By listen three, the smoldering threat to Western civilization started to rise like its star shining in the East. Time’s arrow, for Jonah, now pointed mercilessly forward, toward total serialism or its paradoxical twin, pure chance.

Jonah looked over Wilson Hart’s scores, singing out lines with a voice as forceful as the instruments they were written for. For that treatment alone, Will would have shown him everything he’d ever written. But at the end of a bravura sight-sing, Jonah tossed up his hands. “Will, Will! What’s with all the beauty? You’ll kill us with kindness, man. Single-handedly drag us back into the nineteenth century. What did the nineteenth century ever do for you, except wrap you up in chains?”

I’d sit between them, waiting for the world to end. But they both loved the fight.

“This here’s nothing about the nineteenth century,” Will said, gathering in his wounded troops. “This is your first look at the twenty-first. Y’all just don’t know how to hear it yet.”

“I’ve already heard it. I know all those tunes by heart. Sounds like a Copland ballet.”

“I’d give twice my eyeteeth to write a Copland ballet. Man’s a great composer. Started out messing with that chicken-scratch music of yours. Got tired and gave it up.”

“Copland’s okay, if you dig crowd-pleasers.”

I prayed to Mama’s ghost to come pummel him, as she should have done so often while she was alive.

“And here I was, thinking pleasure was what music’s all about.”

“Look around you, man. The world’s on fire.”

“That’s right. And we’re looking for a nice big ocean to douse it in.”

“You study with Persichetti?”

“Mr. Persichetti studied with Roy Harris, just like our own Mr. Schuman.”

“But Persichetti’s gone past all that. No more recycled folk and jazz. He’s gone on to richer things. So should you. Come on, Wilson! You should be listening to Boulez. Babbitt. Dallapiccola.”

“You think I haven’t wasted hours listening to that? If I want noise, I can stand in the middle of Times Square, get me some. If I want chance, I can play the nags. God told us to build this place up. Make it better, not tear it down and feed it to the dogs.”

“This is building. Listen to Stockhausen. Varèse.”

“If I want police sirens, they’re right outside my apartment every night.”

“Don’t be a slave to melody, man.” Jonah didn’t even hear the word.

“There’s a reason we invented melody, brother Jon. You know the best thing Varèse ever did? Teach William Grant Still to find himself. Now there’s a composer who knew how to sound. You ever ask yourself why no one plays that man’s music? Why you never even heard of a Negro composer until you came nosing around me?”

Jonah shot me conspiratorial grins. I stood between them, band-sawed down the middle.

Will worked on me when Jonah wasn’t around. “I’ve spent years listening to your brother’s deaf gentlemen. Nothing new down that way, Mix. Certainly not the freedom brother Jon hopes to find. You listen to me. That brother of ours gonna come running back to us, ears covered, soon as he tires of the squeaks and bangs.”

Will showed me every new piece that came out of him — dressed-up concert cadences flirting with swing and cool, reverent gospel quotes buried in Dvorák-driven lower brass. He made me swear to him that I’d never forsake melody just because of some bad dream of progress. “Promise me something, Mix. Promise me that someday you will write down all the notes that are inside you.” It seemed a safe-enough vow. I was sure there couldn’t be more than a couple of half-note measures in there, all told.