Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He had this thing about Spain. I don’t know where it came from. Sancho and the Don on horseback. Low, arid hills. Will was going to travel there as soon as he could pay for the trip. Barring Spain, Mexico, Guatemala — anyplace that sparkled after midnight and slept at the peak of the day.

“Must have lived there once, brother Joe. In another life.” Not that he knew the first thing about the place or spoke a word of Spanish. “My people must have paid that land a little visit once. Lived there for a couple of centuries? The Spaniards are the finest Negroes north of Africa. Germans wouldn’t know what to do with this much soul except lock it up.” His hand flew up to sinning lips. “Pay me no mind, Mix! Every people have their notion of what this world’s after.”

Wilson Hart wanted to bridge Gibraltar, to reunite Africa and Iberia, those twins separated at birth. He heard one coiled in the other, where I never could hear any relation at all. What little I learned about African music at Juilliard confirmed that it was an art apart. But Will Hart never gave up trying to get me to hear the kinship, the rhythm joining such disparate rhythms.

I often found Will in one of the cubicles off of the library, hunched over a 1950s turntable with its stylus arm the size of a monkey’s paw, listening to Albéniz or de Falla. He grabbed me one visit and wouldn’t release me. “Just the pair of ears this piece was calling out for.” He sat me down and made me listen to an entire guitar concerto by a man named Rodrigo.

“Well?” he said as the third movement sailed triumphantly into harbor.

“What do you hear, brother Joe?”

I heard a dusty, tonal archaism, wanting to be older than it could honestly admit to being. It flew in the face of history’s long breakdown of consonance. Its sequences were so formal, I completed them before I heard them. “It sure dances.” The best I could do.

His face fell. He wanted me to hear some thing in particular. “What about the man who made it dance?”

“Besides that he comes from northern North Africa?”

“Go ahead and fun me all you want. But tell me what you know about him, now that he’s told you everything.”

I shrugged. “I give up.”

“Blind from the age of three. You really couldn’t hear?”

I shook my head, reaping his disappointment.

“Only a blind man could make this.” Will placed his right hand on his own closed portfolio. “And if God would let me make something even one-tenth as beautiful, I’d be as glad as a—”

“Will! Don’t. Not even in jest.” I think I frightened him.

I asked Jonah if he’d ever heard the piece. Concerto de Aranjuez. He scoffed before I could finish the title. “Total throwback. Written in 1939! Berg had been dead four years already.” As if the true trailblazers would be ahead of anyone, even in dying. “What’s that Will doing to you, man? He’s going to have you whistling to transistor radio by the time we’re out of this joint. Music and wine, Joseph. The less you know, the sweeter you need them.”

“What do you know about wine?”

“Not a damn thing. But I know what I don’t like.”

Jonah was right. Will Hart lived on the school’s suspect fringe. Juilliard still dwelled in that tiny diamond between London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. Music meant the big Teutonic B ’s, those names chiseled into the marble pediment, the old imperial dream of coherence that haunted the continent Da had fled. North American concert music — even Will’s adored Copland and Still — was here little more than a European transplant. That this country had a music — spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and jugged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out everywhere along Chicago’s railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight — the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history — birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full of offspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way — had not yet dawned on these Europe-revering halls.

Jonah’s friends were white, and my friends, aside from Will, were Jonah’s. Not that my brother sought white friends out. He didn’t have to. Dr. Suzuki’s movement was just ten years old; several years would pass before the Asian tsunami hit the States. The handful of Middle Eastern students there had come by way of England and France. Juilliard’s cosmopolitan sea was still more or less a restricted swimming hole.

My brother hung out at Sammy’s, a coffee shop just north of the school. Jonah chose the venue, knowing, as his new friends didn’t, where he could sit with his buddies and still get served. The dive had a state-of the-art Seeburg jukebox, its little claw grabbing the vertical records and slapping them down for a nickel a play. The highbrow student singers claimed to hate the thing, even while guzzling down all the pop culture it served up. After practice hours, half a chorale would hole up at Sammy’s, carrying on in a back booth. Jonah held forth at the singer-infested table, and his friends would always squeeze out a little room for his kid brother.

At Sammy’s, the angelic performers sat for hours playing some variation of the musical ratings game. Who could hit the highest highs? Whose lows were the richest? Who had the cleanest passage points? It was worse than the TV quiz shows they all watched in secret, and just as rigged. The rating judges were never so blatant as to rank one another by number, and they’d only rate singers who weren’t present. But in the constant pegging and scoring, each figured out his own place in the pecking pyramid.

The group’s clown was a deadly eared baritone named Brian O’Malley. With a few tremulous semiquavers, he’d have the others rolling on the linoleum. He could imitate anything, bass through coloratura, without ever needing to tell anyone whom he was mocking. His listeners laughed along, even knowing they’d be next as soon as they were out of earshot. Hands clasped primly in front of his chest, Brian launched into a nightmarish Don Carlos or Lucrezia Borgia, taking a friend’s familiar, small vocal blemish and magnifying it to horrific scale. Afterward, we’d never hear the hapless target the same way again.

O’Malley’s gift mystified me. I asked Jonah one night, from the relative safety of 116th Street. “I don’t get it. If he can reproduce anybody, down to the pimples, why…”

Jonah laughed. “Why can’t he make a voice of his own?” Alone among Juilliard voice students, O’Malley’s voice was featureless beyond parody. “He’s making himself as small a target as possible. He’ll have a career, you know. He’d make a great Fra Melitone. Or a Don Pasquale kind of thing.”

“Not for the voice,” I said, horrified.

“Of course not.”

Jonah could sit for hours and listen to the clique’s ranking games. Their need to evaluate was every bit as great as their need for music. For these athletes in training, the two things were equivalent. Song as competition: fastest, highest, hardest — the soul’s Olympics. Hearing them made me want to lock myself into a practice room and refuse to come out until I’d tamed some snarling Rachmaninoff. But I stuck close to my brother among his friends, the two of us swinging together in the deadly breeze. Jonah picked up their idiom like a native speaker. “Haynes’s middle five notes are just about perfect,” or “Thomas has a girl in every portamento.” His verdicts always had an innocent wonder to them. He never sounded like he was slandering anyone.