Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Jonah flirted with every vocalist at Juilliard. And every flirtee, safe in the absurdity of his appetite, flirted back. His voice could turn the yellowest head. To a twenty-year-old elite female in the late 1950s, he offered all the thrill of transgression, all the more exciting by being harmless, of course. Unthinkable.

I found something to praise in his every new drab goddess, raising the same enthusiasm I mustered for his recitals, whose repertoire now baffled me. The simple trip from tonic to dominant and back now bored Jonah. Only the most jagged music still promised him a real workout. Tritones and the devil’s other intervals, weird new notational systems, polyrhythm, microtones: He only wanted to keep growing, a thing the world rarely forgave.

Jonah fell deeper into the avant-garde, a group the mainstream singers called “the Serial Killers.” The Killers wore the badge proudly, worshiping at the shrine of their imported saint of rigor, Schoenberg, canonized the instant he died at UCLA, of all places, a few years before. They declared everything outside the twelve-tone row to be mere ornament, a fate worse than beautiful.

The Serial Killers talked idly about going to see the first full staging of Moses und Aron at the Zurich Stadttheater. When that pipe dream fell through, they vowed to do their own read-through. Jonah was Aaron, the silver-tongued spokesman for his speech-impaired brother. He wasn’t yet twenty, but already he could pick up, in quick study, the thorniest music. He grasped the complex systems the same way he’d learned preadolescence’s simple diatonic pleasures. He made atonality sound as light as Offenbach.

Jonah talked Da out of the apartment for the performance. “ Moses und Aron?Stories of the patriarchs? I raise my children to be good God-fearing atheists, and this is the thanks?” But the read-through delighted Da. All night long, he nodded at the revival of a story he never thought to pass along to us. He beamed at his son’s otherworldly ability to hold his pitch amid a cacophony of signs and wonders.

I never understood Schoenberg. I don’t mean just that unfinished opera libretto, the unsolvable enigma of divine will. I mean the music. I couldn’t feel it. Da wasn’t much better. He ribbed Jonah all the way home. “Do you know what Stravinsky said at the first Pierrot?”

“I know the story, Da.”

“‘I wish that woman would stop talking so I can hear the music!’ Hey. You should laugh, boychik. It’s funny.”

“I laughed the first time, Da. A hundred years ago.

“Ruth didn’t come to the read-through.” Jonah, forced casual.

“She is starting on the funny age,” Da explained.

Jonah snorted. “When does the funny age start?”

“Right around 1905,” I said.

“I embarrass her. She’s ashamed of me. Doesn’t want to see her brother in greasepaint. A stooge of the elite.”

His voice had a note I’d never heard. Da waved off his injury. “The girl is just twelve years.” But Jonah was right. Ruth stayed home increasingly now, whenever she could, preferring her girlfriends to her family. She had her ear pointed elsewhere — other voices, other tunes.

Not long after the Schoenberg, Da, Jonah, and I chanced to catch a radio news broadcast of a faint signal from outer space. The signal came back from the first human thing to escape the earth’s surface. I thought of that star map, Jonah’s and my only decoration at Boylston, in the sealed room of our childhood. We sat with one another around the family radio, listening to the regular beep, the first word from out there, the future.

Jonah heard just the opposite. His ears were tuned to further frequencies, the groundbreaking past that all signals were rushing to join. “Joey. You hear that? Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. It’s happening, little brother. And in our lifetime! ‘I feel the air of another planet.’”

“‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten.’”Da spoke to himself, remembering, in a distant orbit.

That ethereal, beeping metronome drew Ruthie from her room, where she now hid out. “A signal from space?” My sister’s face filled with awful hope. One hand flew up to the side of her eyes, blocking her peripheral sight. I knew what possibilities she was turning over. “That’s coming from somewhere else?”

Da smiled. “The first space satellite.”

Ruth waved, impatient with his denseness. “But someone is out there? Sending…”

Da formed the corrections to his corrections. “No, Kind. Only us. Alone, and talking to ourselves.”

Ruth retreated to her room. I tried to follow, but she closed her door on me.

Those cycling beeps from outer space confirmed Jonah’s iconoclasm. He studied new notation systems at night, asking my help in decoding their hieroglyphs, even as his teachers gave him Belle Epoch salon songs. In the future that his progressive music was making, all objects bathed in the same blinding light. When the time came, he’d be free, released to deep orbit, signaling the earth from out of the endless vacuum.

I heard him at school, sailing up his aerial chromatic scales, a few practice rooms down from mine. My own practice hours were more plodding. Mr. Bateman gave me Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Each time I played for my teacher, he’d nudge my fingers, wrists, elbows. I felt my body extending the piano, those tripping hammers replayed at large in my more intricate muscle.

I worked through the Lyric Pieces, one every two weeks, a dozen bars every afternoon. I’d repeat the phrase until the notes dissolved under me, the way a word turns back to meaningless purity when chanted long enough. I’d split twelve bars into six, then shatter it down to one. One bar, halting, rethreading, retaking, now soft, now mezzo, now note for staggered note. I’d experiment with the attacks, making my hand a rod and striking each machine-coupled note. I’d relax and roll a chord as if it were written out arpeggio. I’d repeat the drill, depressing the keys so slowly, they didn’t sound, playing the whole passage with only releases. I’d lean on the bass or feel my hands, like an apprentice conjurer extracting hidden interior harmonies from the fray.

The game was leverage, control. Speed and span, how to crack open the intervals, widen them from on high, raise the body’s focus from finger into arm, lengthen the arm like a hawk on the wing. I’d coat the line in rubato or tie every note into a legato flow. I’d round the phrase or clip it, then pedal the envelope and let it ring. I’d turn the baby grand into a two-manual harpsichord. Play, stop, lift, rewind, repeat, stop, lift, back a line, back a phrase, back two bars, half a bar, the turn, the transition, the note, the thinnest edge of attack. My brain sank into states of perfect tedium laced with intense thrill. I was a plant extracting petals from sunlight, water wearing away a continent’s coast.

I’d chink away for hours, moving my spine less than four inches in either direction. Then I’d stand, pace around my cubicle like a zoo wolf spinning in his pen, head down the hall, and stick my head under the arc from the drinking fountain. The halls filled with glorious racket. All around me, bursts of broken-off melody bled together like an Ives symphony. Crusts of Chopin collided with fractured Bach invention. Ostinato Stravinsky attached itself to Scarlatti fragments. Earnest, industrial-grade laboring here and there delivered strains more gorgeous than anything I’d ever heard in concert, snippets so beautiful they plunged me into depression when they broke off in midphrase. Down this monastic clubhouse hall came a mass version of my parents’ old Crazed Quotation game: hymns pressing up against honky-tonk; high Romantic philters elbowing rigid fugues; funerals, weddings, baptisms, sobs, whispers, shouts: everyone at this party talking at once, beyond any ear’s ability to unravel.